I have heard many different opinions on this but how does the following effect your rankings for google. I have 5 blogs. 5 different domain names. All separate topics. 1 hosting service. One of the sites will follow my day to day successes and failures building all 5 blogs. So obviously there will be alot of linking to my other 4 sites (or not). Is this ok or will it hurt me SEO wise?
I wouldn't think it would hurt you SEO wise but if you want to limit the risk, put all 5 on unique IP addresses and only link the other 4 from the first one i.e. don't link the other 4 sites from every blog.
There are only a few things that really "hurt" your position in search, and they are the "black hat" tricks or just general bad behaviour. Building lots of websites and blogs isn't going to really hurt you, but you will have to question the value of your actions. If you are just building the blogs to see how SEO tactics are affected, then its fine. If you are doing it to compare SEO results, then thats fine too. If you are doing it to maximise your link juice back to your main domain, then you are better off moving onto different IPs, or you could build them on wordpress.com etc.