Can a company group have reciprocal links on their company websites without being penalised by Google?

[RedAntSolutions]

A client which is part of a group of businesses all within one industry but have different purposes has come to us aith a "brilliant idea" that they all have a blog on their website that links to every business within their group.  We are pretty sure that this will be seen as "black hat" by Google, but just wanted to see what you all thought?  Thanks!

[paints-n-design]

Make BlogPosts just to be able to link to other own-Domains is wasting time and money.
Make Blog Post for Users wich helps answering questions (wich may earn links) is a better idea for a blog.

The "brilliant Idea" starts wrong, I usually dont think "what can I do for search engines" (Admit - years ago I did, I was young and needed the money :D)

[JamesCrossland]

It's an awful idea and you need to tell them as their SEO expert.

It's an artificial network and  will be seen as manipulation of teh links and nothing more. If there's a good reason for the link then nofollow it and have it there for the UX but otherwise no, no, no! (Did I say no lol?)

[badgergravling]

It's not the best idea, as mentioned above.

What tends to work is having them as footer links for people who might be interested in the group of companies. The logical answer is to nofollow these, and they may still pass some benefits without the risk of penalty. However, when you look at large publishing groups for example (I know these well as I've worked for a few), they'll quite often list all their main publication websites in the footer, and also have them all followed.

Now it may be that Google has missed them for a penalty, or it may be as massive publishers and possibly advertisers they're getting more leeway. But it's worth saying that they certainly don't seem to have suffered - there was a case study by Viperchill ages ago covering Hearst http://www.viperchill.com/google-control/