Are their different methods for ranking/linking for google.co.uk vs google.com? If so, what? Any help given about this would be appreciated, thank you.
The basic ranking methods of all of the various Googles is pretty uniform. They each face slightly different SPAMming methods, so there are some differences, but they shouldn't affect your basic white-hat methods of optimization. What does great matter when it comes to the differences between them though is geo-location. All of the major search engines give a great deal of consideration to the geo-location of a site in their ranking methods - even when the user does not request a country-specific search. The basic assumption is that the closer a site is to the user, the more relevant it will be to his query. And its not an unreasonable idea, but it does mean that you need to let the search engines know the location of your site. The major search engines use two common criteria to determine geo-location: (1) the presence of a Country Code Top Level Domain Name (ie. "CC TLD" as in "www.site.co.uk"), or (2) for generic TLD's (.com, .net, .org, .info, etc.) the physical location of the server that hosts the site, based on its IP address. Google has recently introduced a panel in the Webmaster Tools Console that will allow you to select a preferred geo-location, which *may* override the other two factors in time. I haven't investigated it enough to check it for reliability. The upshot is that if you want to do well in google.co.uk, you need your site to be seen as being in the UK. So your best choice is a .uk TLD. Second choice is using a host that is physically located in the UK. Be careful here. At least one popular UK hosting service actually has their servers in The Netherlands.