Lisa - 4:28 pm on Jun 20, 2002 (gmt 0)

The thing to clearly avoid is every page of every site linking to all the other sites.

Let's say I had these six sites, (For Branding Reasons like you said)

CompanyABC.com
------------
ProductX.com
ProductZ.COM
ProductY.COM
ProductQ.COM
ProductV.COM

I would not want a link from on every single page of ProductQ.COM to go to all the other domains. Clearly this could be for marketing, but what it is doing is creating a PR0 nightmare waiting to happen. Be smart about how you interlink. Allow CompanyABC.com to be your hub if you will, if you still want to do your interlinking with no penalty possibilities then do a redirect link and tell Google that the redirect page should not be crawled (in robots.txt). This means you will not pass PR and Google will not consider you for PR0. This will allow humans to follow your link nest, but Google will not see the interlinking.

The rule at Google is; Do not pass PR, do not go to Jail. Collect $200.