Robert_Charlton - 7:21 pm on Aug 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'm late to this thread as I've been distracted for the past couple of weeks, but in a quick reading of this, I see that one topic hasn't been touched on... and that's the question of inbound links.

My guess is that many of your sites, even though they don't link to each other, rely on pretty much the same sources for their inbound links. If you've got 100 sites in the same market area, I don't see how you would have avoided this. As such, this adds one more factor to the already clear picture that these are not independent sites.