How to cross link between different language domains?
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According to Google(last paragraph), you shouldn't worry about duplicate content issues:
"Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a"noindex" robots meta tag.
However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both
example.de/andexample.com/de/show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers." -
Better to keep them as separate entities and not cross link them at all or it could be perceives and reciprocal linking in order to manipulate search results. Although I am sure you are already exposing ownership by hosting on same domain.
The .com and co.uk might be duplicate content BTW. Other languages are not considered duplicate.
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If he incorporates the rel-alternate-hreflang tag, that should deal with both issues.
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By the way, when interlinking domains is done, with multiple sites owned by one enterprise it is usually one way linking from the lesser sites to the main enterprise site (usually the .com) so it is like a hub with all lesser sites passing page juice to the main site and making that site stronger.
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Check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday
and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond
Those deal with footer links across multiple domains/regions.