So I have a .com (US hosted and targeted) blog that is doing pretty well in Google, but I want to expand into a few other countries - India, Australia, UK, Canada - and I was wondering if it would be better to incorporate these new blogs into the .com, or whether I should get country specific domains and hosting for each one and simply link to them using the established site? Any thoughts?
By the way, I'm leaning towards going for country specific domains/hosting because I'm under the impression that they will rank better, but I just wanted to make sure.
If you were to do this, you would still have to get unique content on each domain. This isn't very easy to do with a blog. You would probably be best off to just work at getting more international links to your blog. If you were to start fresh with new country specific blogs, you are setting yourself up for a lot of work to create unique content and to get quality backlinks for each blog. You would want to avoid the type of cross linking that you suggested. That is the type of artificial linking that Google does not like. This could lead to penalties on all of your blogs. Country specific domains/hosting does give a site an edge, but it still needs plenty of quality backlinks.
If your doing well enough you can hire help to write blogs for specific country blog sites... But you can't replicate any content.
I know yahoo has a campaign for Yahoo! South East Asia. Very smart idea. Ive a link somewhere, but likely easiest to head to Yahoo itself and search
If you want to rank internationally, get as many links as you can from site hosted in any country. In short, spread your links all over the world.