Will google apply any sanctions upon my site if I promote it by creating few blogs and put links to my site? I guess this is not considered "natural" link building... And one more: I see many people here have links to their websites in their signatures. Why are they not go as spamming (in the eyes of Google)? Every new post = new link...
Sure, you can create a number of blogs that will link to your site. The main question is - who will link to these blogs? That is, you still need to promote them too, and if you have a way to gain a link to a blog, why not use that way to gain a link directly to your website instead? As for a penalty, they said Google considers the IP address of a website, so if many websites from the same IP (IP range) link to each other - this may seem suspicious in Google's eyes, so it may devalue those links. Though, unfortunately, I cannot prove this theory with my own experience. There are no other drawbacks, if the IPs are different, from what I can see. On the other hand, as long as these links are relevant to the topic of your website and the blogs are relevant too - the links will seem natural, so there's nothing to worry about except my very first question - [strike-out]who watches the watchmen[/strike-out] who links to those blogs? These links have extremely low value, especially if the topic of a linked page is not relevant to the forum topic.
Cross website linking is no welcomed by Google, but there are always exceptions. If you link just few websites, it should be OK and nobody will recognize it as spam or link building strategy. Please make sure when you cross link website, they should be related (don't link food related website with iphone website).
For me, it is a good way to promote and link build a website. (Provided you don't copy content from other websites; other wise, it will be a spamblog)
In my experience Google finds you if, You interlink those blogs Your site reciprocally links to them Those share same IP address You create and link them at once to your site in similar fashion (same anchor, same landing page) Once found, Google will degrade all the link value those blogs are passing to your site, de-index them and their PR bar will be grayed, no matter how many backlinks you have for them...in worse case, it may affect main site's ranking and PR as well (if done in excess). If the contents of those blogs is irrelevant to a site then, its not going to benefit whatsoever...thus needless to think of degradation in terms of link juice. Hope it helps!
Dont do it specially is you are not willing to create quality blogs... just auto generated junk to gain you some links
As SEO.Geek says, it's worth doing if the content of the blogs is of value. There's no point otheriwse, Google is getting very good at detecting junk.