Trisha - 5:50 am on Nov 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

I have no idea what % of links came from anywhere, never looked at that kind of stuff. I'm pretty sure we all linked out to other blogs quite a bit. None of the blogs were brand new - they were all created at different times by different people and each had there own history. We only found each because when the other site rejected us, they screwed up and put all our email addresses in the TO part of the email, so we could all see each other's email address.

We only linked to each other in a blog roll - I don't think we linked in posts. Certainly not in any planned way or anything. I believe we all used the name of the blog as anchor text. Hardly anyone else in the group would have even known anything about anchor text. I certainly didn't give them any tutorials on SEO or anything.

Honestly, we weren't thinking at all about getting links and ranking in Google. We just wanted to work together and create a great group of blogs about the topic.

I've already uploaded the disavow, so the long comments are there. I have nothing to hide, I did nothing bad. Except being naive about the one guy and not quitting the whole thing sooner once I realized what he was about.

I'm still linking to the other blogs, and said so in the comments. They are good, quality blogs and nice people - I'm not going to stop linking to them, there is no logical reason to stop.

I wouldn't say it was a 'closed' group.