Previously I did some testing of PR ranks and on On some blogs and also some classifieds/sales/auction sites I've seen that there are repetetive link lists in the widgets. Here is how they are structured. Just assume you got ten blogs, each with his own domain or subdomain. On one widget of each blog there is a list with links to each of the 10. So each blog will also have 9 backlinks from each of the other blogs/sites and this multiplied by the pages on each site/blog. All These blogs seem to do well regarding PR and visitors. Now my question is, whether this PR power stems from the link network OR is google penalizing this kind of link networks?
I think its similar to link manipulation and cross linking to get fast links... its ok if they have different IP range.