Thanks Kurt,

Yes I have a pool of idle sites but I'm plannig to hit this hard with a fresh bunch.

My main concern is how to make the network more google friendly and capture some long tail along the way (I'll cloak).

That's why I wanted to use contextual links in the first place.

The fact is, the way Dave sets up his network is subomptimal, since linkubator blogs will randomly reciprocating. It may not be an issue for MSN (I'm not sure) but it's easily avoidable without compromising the link amplification process... which I guess is the real reason behind the original setup and not the indexing issues mentioned by Dave.

I'm not sure about the blackhole. Maybe submitting it to RSS aggregators as if there was no tomorrow would be the best route of action.

Backlinks and duplicate content in MSN.... Since there is PR to increase keyword authority in MSN I assume that being indexed is all we need to have the full worth of our backlinks. I assume there is no supplemental index that we need PR to get out of so duplicate content shouldn't be an issue. All we need is to get the page containing the backlink indexed. Does this sound ok to you? I'm asking this because I'm hesitating between using PLR, aggregating RSS feeds or cloaking on markov.