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From what you described, the page you deleted was already being penalized, a fact that is proven since you were not receiving the massive amounts of traffic you had on the other one. The main page is probably going to remain unchanged but it's good that you removed the old one.
Some people will say 301 regardless of the situation but here is what I usually look at before choosing to either 301 or 404 it:
In most cases I would recommend creating new content for the page if it is worth keeping, if not, a 404 won't hurt your SEO so don't worry.
Hope this helps
Since you're already doing so well on the SERPS perhaps you might want to focus on generating a wider presence by targeting more keywords or long-tail keywords where you don't have a presence already.
If you've connected your site to Google web master tools you can find which keywords are bringing you the most traffic and then improve on the ones that aren't.
Don't think there is anything you should be worried about.
It seems like you're the only person to have had such a bad experience with customer care, could it be that your tone on the phone was similar to the one you are having here?
Having said that the rank tracker tool is glitchy but it clearly says above it to simply create a campaign for more accurate results
We've noticed that rather than being a number it's a percentage. Once you hit 80% of all anchor text being the same term you will usually get penalized. This doesn't seem to apply to new sites though.
Hi, as you may know Google change their algorithm multiple times each year so here's a few things you should go over first:
www . yoursite . com/index.html
yoursite . com/index.html
www . yoursite . com/
yoursite . com/
Use 301 redirect and canonical link element to solve this issue if it exists.
From what you are describing your site doesn't seem to have been penalized but, instead the more logical things that have happened are that you have lost a few positions due to small oversights or due to matters outside of your control
a) Your competitors have made a strong push to out-rank you
b) You have lost a few valuable backlinks either because they have been removed or they have lost value for reasons outside your control.
Hope this helps, let me know if you need more help
Word Separators
Avoid hyphens. Hyphens detract from credibility and can act as a spam indicator. (This is a direct quote from the SEOMoz blog)
Also, Google webmaster tools lets you set geo-location preferences to sub directories. You can do this by creating a new "site" listing in google webmaster central that also includes the subdirectory, so in addition to having a www.domain.com listing you would create an additional listing for www.domain.com/it (Italy) or www.domain.com/uk (for the UK) and then set the geo location accordingly. When you're creating backlinks and tracking traffic it's logical to do it per location when you are running a directory so that's another argument in favour of sub-directories.
Sub directories are standard practice, however I should mention that if you are aiming for user generated content in this directory and if the topics are broadly varied then you should also consider sub domains. Separating user generated content into its own subdomain allows Panda to penalize low-quality content and leaves the quality content untouched.
Hope this helps 
Our site was listed on the first page for the phrase Active SEO on Google.co.uk. We suddenly find ourselves on page 4 overnight and we're not sure what's going on.
We have not undertaken an Black hat techniques however the site is fairly new.
Anyone have any ideas as to what is going on?