HI Karl,

>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.

It's not optimal for Google, but Dave says it is for MSN. I'll take his work on this until we learn better.

>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.

Now, if you plan on using the blackhole mainly for RSS submission, then it would be better to use it on as many IPs as you can.

In addition to RSS submit and random linking, a really good blackhole can generate tons and tons of "unique content", then syndicated to tons of tin level blogs.

To use as content, think of it as an article spinner, but more poweful.

>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 agree.

Let me add, according to Dave Kelly, and he has a good point, the reason to use MSN is that it isn't nearly competitive as Google.

While it doesn't drive the traffic google does, it is also alot easier to get traffic for more competitive keywords.

For example, for Google you may SEO for a long tail keyword like:
custom big dog collars

Whereas for MSN:
dog collars

"Dog collars" in MSN may bring more traffic than ""custom big dog collars" does from Google, and may be esier to rank for. Again, this is just the general theory and everyone's results will vary.