Google Penalites? Blog Networks

With google not being 100% clear on what exactly a link scheme is,and I heard somewhere that Matt Cutts stated that creating a network of free blogs just to post your links could get you penalized, I was wondering if this was true. Im guessing it is, and if so does anyone have any more information on this?

I was also wondering if the use of sites like Usfreeads and Squidoo could be considered the same as a blog in a linking scheme?

Thanks

 

Sure, 1000 blogs on the same IP could get you penalized. 10-20 Squidoo lenses will hardly give you any trouble
Matt Cutts is after the big spammers, not the small guy.

 

So for example... if i posted each article I wrote on a blog I shouldent have a problem. But what happens when for a particular website I get up to like 300 articles? Once I get to a certain point will I end up getting penalized anyway, and basically I wasted my time and setting up the network anyway?

 

If your content is unique and you have a blog linking to your main site from time to time there won't be any problem. In fact Google will appreciate that because of the unique and related content that you generate. That's considered a "good neighborhood" for your main site.

 

So if I wrote an article, posted it to my site and to a few directories, and then posted the same article on several free blogs, would the content still be considered unique? Or even if the article was changed slightly, would posting it to free blogs be considered manipulating page rank?

 

you should never post the unmodified article to more than one place. do rewrite and submit a modified version if you do not want to get dup penalty from google.

 

Yeah some of these blog networks are merely link farms and if they are all on the same IP you can be in big trouble. I post links on a seperate blog network that carries high pr on the sites and the blogs on on different IP's so even if one gets shut down the others will be untouched.

 

I have seen a lot of blogs posting less than 5 articles with links and left the blogs for years.

 

LOL, this sounds like one of my blogs At least I am not paying for hosting (though I still pay for renewing the domain every year).

I'd be actually interesting to hear from others if they have these "hanging" blogs as well.

 

Of course it won't be considered unique. You will have to rewrite it, otherwise don't publish the same article anywhere else.