Wizard - 5:00 am on Jul 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

Maybe it's not a crosslinking penalty, but no-separate-sites bonus? I mean, now your sites rank exactly as if it were one site (obviously, there is always much crosslinking inside a domain). Before, Google was fooled it were separate sites and added more value to the links, now it's over?

I think you should keep relevant links between your sites and concentrate on gaining external links. What's most important, try to get links to your sites separately - if you buy a link from a site, buy it just to one of your sites, not to all ten! So the sites will look less related.

Of course, the best it would be to avoid sharing the same IP by all your sites, but gaining external links from totally separated sites helps - this my guess of the criteria in Google to decide if some sites sharing the IP are really separate sites - how many inbound links to these sites come from the same sites!