Is their value in building your own website network?

[Millibit]

--- I am moving this into open discussion to see if I can get a few more responses, I am very curious if anyone has experience in this area ---

Hello, As a resource for my link building strategies I have often wondered if building my own 'web network' of sites would prove to be valuable in link building.  For example, if I were targeting the travel industry (or insert a niche here) and created 30 websites on various related topics in the industry, would using outbound links from those sites to other relevant websites help increase domain authority?

Obviously, I would need to avoid creating unusable sites with boilerplate content just for the sole purpose of linking.  I am envisioning working websites/blogs that would be valuable on their own.

Some thoughts and questions that have crossed my mind:

1. If these sites are all hosted on the same server, would the link exchange end up in penalization in the SERPs?

2. Being that the sites are designed to be quality sites on their own, can they share links between themselves if the links are relevant?

3. This is already being done across the web, but what makes one network valuable and 'quality' vs another

Being a web dev / host as well as SEO guy I would like to utilize those resources to create a network that is of quality and of value, but am not sure about things appearing 'unnatural'... It seems that the majority of link building falls into the 'unnatural' category as we as SEOs are constantly trying to place our links throughout the web vs. site owners linking naturally back to a website

[giantpeach]

It's good that you are looking to build quality sites and I'm sure they will work for you in time. I would host them on separate servers though.

I don't see why you couldn't link between some of them if it seems a natural thing to do.

Would say that a valuable network is one that engages and influences a lot of people. They will take quite a long time to build up though, especially if you are doing 30.

Good luck

[Millibit]

Thanks for the feedback!  As for hosting on separate servers, I have thought about going that route, but then I look at some of the larger networks with hundreds of sites if not thousands and I am not guessing that they are all on separate servers.  I could do the leg work of some reverse DNS to find that out (will update this post)

I can see with spammy sites how the same server would hurt a network as it could quickly become a 'bad neighborhood', but I don't think google would likely penalize sites on the same network if the incoming links are from outside root domains and the site is of decent quality

I feel like the answer to this lies in the inbound links and the content quality of the sites, but am looking for some hard evidence to support my thoughts.

A good example is Smashing Networks series of sites... I need to do some research on that