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Thanks Ryan - that's great to know.  We'll definitely bear both of those in mind!

Thanks guys - point taken on the fact that the links won't be worth a great deal - the actual intention with spinning out the sites was to serve quite distinct users, rather than to try anything black-hat, and obviously we'd expect the site value to decrease by at least the amount of any content moved off the site.  The topics are pretty distinct, so the feeling is that over time, they'll each be able to build up value in those distinct areas.

I guess the real question (and I could have phrased this better!) was whether there's anything else we should be particularly careful to avoid?  We're fine with engines realising that all the content is from the same source, and it's pretty well advertised all over the sites, but the last thing we want to do is take a big SEO hit beyond that initial one of just shifting a couple of posts around to have a few things on the other sites after launch?

We've spun out content from a single finance related news/analysis site (running for about 2 years) into several topic-specific sites on individual topics (markets, investment etc etc).  They're all on the same server, use the same CMS (using a multisite setup), and share largely the same codebase, though obviously with customisations for the site names, and we've made sure each has a distinct identity.

At the bottom of each page, we're linking to 'latest posts on the network', aggregating the 5 most recent posts from all the sites and displaying them in the footer.  We've obviously made sure the actual content is completely unique on each site though.

Just wondering if anyone has any tips about ensuring we don't dilute our SEO too much. and how to maximise our effectiveness?