Does linking my 2 sites together violate the [Google] quality guidelines?

Interlinking a ton of blogs used to work great pre-penguin, but yeah now they're really good at detecting site networks like this, even when you try to hide your tracks by spreading your sites out among multiple IP's and stuff.

In this vid Cutts says that if you have a lot of sites you're not likely to put as much effort into them and because of that the network will look bad. But what sucks is this is true even for webmasters who do put a lot of work into it. I've worked with clients who pay others to write unique posts for their entire network of blogs, and they still got smacked by Penguin.. since there's a lot more to consider when running a network of blogs than just your content or your interlinking.

First step is to chill with the site wide sidebars & footers, old school blogs still have network-wide links that display on every single page of every single blog, which creates tons of low value links that are over-optimized for the same keywords = penguin food.

Matt Cutts is a dipshit.

Solution is simple: rel="nofollow"

You don't violate google's guidelines and you still have traffic flow between your sites. Forget about dedicated IP's, link juice, page rank and other bullshit. Interlink your sites with "nofollow" and make them surfer-friendly.

Related topic: normal link
Unrelated circlejerking: javascript, nofollow

i don't give a fuck of google.

edit: but his answer makes sense

Disney.com links into their games for kids site, their theme parks site, their movies site, etc... Mainly because somebody might get to disney.com and be looking for something more in depth.

If your site does similar you are good. But if there is no real reason to send the surfer elsewhere then you are linking for low quality reasons.

I never seen sense in crosslinking,only linking from several domains to one or more money sites.

Very logical video info..