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I have found it hard to evaluate links on a weekly basis, too. All tools give different results. You need to pick 1 tool, create a spreadsheet, and then track links with that same tool week to week. At least you should know on a relative basis if you're improving or not, even if you're not getting the exact true link count. The Link Analysis tab of SEOmoz shows some stats (external followed links, followed links root domains, unique C-blocks) that are useful to track over time, but they only update about once a month (note to SEOmoz: weekly would be great) The one thing you CAN track week to week is your SERP rankings, on the Rankings tab. You can track number of phrases you have in the top 3, as well as number of phrases on page 1. If your external link building is progressing then those numbers should go up week over week. And those numbers drive your organic search visits per week, which you can view on the Traffic tab, or in Google Analytics directly. As far as follow/no-follow goes, remember that you want a 'normal' anchor text distribution and usually a normal anchor text profile will include some no-follows. So keep some no-follows in there...

We've seen a great potential here with some of our projects' competitors and are also thinking that there's a point to go for this strategy ... as long as you're not promoting one site that then links to your main site, but use your satellite sites to promote the main site, I believe there's a good potential.