Does Google Follow A "Brand" accross domain extensions?

[kidder]

I have a 6 year old .com with good stable rankings and good trust in Google - New content is crawled and indexed almost daily, we can have between 6 - 20 new pages on average added each day - Google loves us right now (should I even say that?)

Now I plan to introduce the exact same site with the same domain in the .co.uk - Of course the content will all be unique to the UK audience but for branding and other reasons the site "engine" and layout will be an exact replica.

The sites will be linked so my question is this - given the exact same domain name and CSS layout / crawl structure how much love will be passed from the .com to the new .co.uk - if any?

Should I link to the .co.uk from a dedicated page or run site wide links?

[Quadrille]

Google follows links from one page to another; it has no interest in brands, template designs or anything like that. Any connection between one of your sites and another will be no different to connections between any two sites, anywhere.

And the form and numbers of links will be assessed in the same way too.

If there is a logic to linking them for your visitors, then that's fine. On the other hand, if you 'overdo it' for your visitors, you probably have for Google.

Just act natural!
Promote the sites as individual sites, on their merits. If they can help each other, that's a bonus.

If the pages share a lot of code (as opposed to 'content'), overlinking is inviting disaster.

If you have a site that Google loves, why risk the love going sour?

[edited by: Quadrille at 3:23 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2007]

[kidder]

Google.com
Google.co.uk
Google.co.nz etc etc

Same with any other site that builds a global brand I just thought Google may be clever enough to see this pattern and pass the weight of the primary site through to the other name extensions if certain criteria are met. Hey I thought it almost made sense :)

[Quadrille]

Never forget Quadrille's Oft-Quoted First Law*:

"Content is King"

Google doesn't.

*Stolen from Bill Gates, for those who don't know Quadrille's Oft-Quoted 42nd Law!