martinibuster - 4:09 am on Mar 1, 2009 (gmt 0)

ROS links are fairly common. Many bloggers have a "favorite sites" section where they share links to sites they feel are authoritative. Think of bloggers who have ROS links to WebmasterWorld or other similar sites. Automating the penalization of that could possibly cause collateral damage to authoritative sites.

The only time I have personally witnessed a penalty for interlinking involved a site with hundreds of "sister" sites all in the same niche. It had something to do with a certain topic. So they had a main topic site, but they had other sites built around keywords related to other types of related topics. They'd been hit with a penalty and we're wondering why. So they contacted me because they wanted to hire me to help them. I talked to them for a half hour and from what they told me it seemed that was the problem so I told them what to do to fix it. I don't think they ever thanked me but they used my advice and got unbanned.