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The short answer is no. Your site can benefit from other unique sites (such as your blogs) which link to it. In order for those links to have value, the PR of the linking page needs to have value which means other sites need to link to your blog site. In order for that to happen you would need to create quality content and place it on your blog sites. Your main site would benefit more by placing your blog articles directly on the main site then by receiving links from your other microsites.

And the beauty is you have the opportunity to help change that.

I hadn't heard of the farmer update, thanks for the tip.  After researching it, this could definitely have contributed.  My client had previously had SEO work done by a company that relied heavily on Article Marketing and it also appears that they submitted the site to a multitude of link farms.