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Hi Mike, I do think that there is going to be an even more local bias in search results; and we will see a lot more of the phenomenon that you describe above ie.a site going up in local/ country-specific results while going down in international results.  While it will not be impossible to rank highly globally, it has and will continue to become a lot more challenging to do so, especially for terms that are quite competitive. To market better internationally - or specific geographic markets, you may need to give those geo signals to Google, which could be having country-targeted pages on the site; geo-targeted sub-domains/ sub-folders or even separate websites targeted at a market that you are targeting. Regarding the second issue, if I understand you correctly,having keywords in the url isn't bad/ black hat-- it is perfectly legitimate and  recommended (though not necessarily a must-have). So, if it doesn't involve a whole lot of re-development and you feel that is making a huge difference in the space you are operating, then you should go for it. Hope this helps. Best, Manoj