I am getting ready to launch a series of websites targeting a very small niche. Each one will focus on a particular section of the niche and I plan on eventually cross referencing them in some form. After some research and my familiarity with WordPress, I've decided to use their blogging software for these websites. I've managed to acquire a series of domains that I like, but I got to thinking about it. Would it be better from an SEO standpoint to develop all of these sites on subdomains/directories of a single domain name, rather than using individual domains for each website? I thought I remembered Google starting to penalize networking websites that inter-link a lot. Which would you suggest and why? Hopefully this is the correct forum for this question....
Well I believe it's best to use subdomains for each topic. As you said, Google is penalizing link farms sites so is not worth the pain.