Penalty Risk To Other Site

Can one hurt the others?

[Tiebreaker]

If you have a few sites and one of them gets a penalty for some reason (I am 100% white hat, I don't even link any of my sites together, but you never know) - is there any risk of causing a penalty to also be imposed on other sites you own?

I'm assuming that penalties would only be imposed on a network of sites if that network were actually linked together - and that all of the sites had a reason to be penalized

I have a few, nice clean sites, that are not adsense or affiliate - but I'm considering starting up a little affiliate site in a niche that I think could be profitable.

I'm planning to keep the affiliate site 100% legit and not link it to any of my 'proper' sites - and it will be hosted on a different server just to be extra cautious, with a private domain registration.

Although my affiliate site will not be in any way spammy - it is in a niche where many of the competion is black hat and spammy - which worries me that google might impose very broad penalties on all sites in this niche - and I might get caught up in the crossfire.

Has anyone ever experience other genuine sites of theirs being penalized in this situation - in effect, google saying I'm going to punish this individual by penalizing every site he owns - even though all the others are 100% clean and totally unrelated in any way - the only connection being the same owner in the whois record.

[Simsi]

I cant see this would happen as it would be open to competitor abuse. My guess is that if the Google algo believes there is some network behaviour that suggests this, they would merely discount or reduce the relevance of any suggestive behaviour.