rainborick - 10:02 pm on Dec 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

If the site uses a generic Top Level Domain name (.com, .net, .org, .info, etc.) then you can set a different Geographic Target for subdirectories in the Google Webmaster Tools console. But, you're correct that if you have identical content in these subdirectories, Google and the other search engines will only allow one version of each page to be included in the index. So you'd have to customize the content in each subdirectory in order to be successful with this method.