Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I wonder if it is actually wrong to generate backlinks in this way though?  I know there was some guy who used the widgets to advertise unrelated products but that's not what I'm doing. I had two, one one the front of the poll with our domain name, and a second with "Create your own free poll" on the results (displayed initially as a hidden div which appears once the vote button is hit) Well I chickened out today and set both links to nofollow as the sites already ranked well before the polls were launched and I don't want to risk it. I just wish there was some official guidance on this.

Thanks for the replies. Linking the sites together would be difficult as they are marketed at different segments. The main sites are well known and marketed to different segments, (free and professional.) People search for them by brand so I wouldn't want to merge them, + that's too many eggs in one basket for my liking. The third site is a branded toolkit containing the same services plus a couple of others.  It's already had a PR7 site in a related niche merged into a sub folder about a year ago. My plan was to link (either one way or reciprocal) the free and professional sites to the under-performing mixed bag one. There is no duplicate content but if anything could cause a problem then I won't do it.