Wordpress / Pretty Link Question
 

This is a question for you Wordpress Gurus.

Would there be any disadvantages with creating a Wordpress installation that was hidden from search engines and have every link on a Blog Network hosted on that site.

This is for organization and tracking of pretty links, using the Pretty Link plugin.

So for example, assume I have 200 blogs, I set up an additional blog with pretty link installed and I add all my links there, then I use those links to link to sponsors on the 200 blogs in my blog network. Would there be possible search engine penalties by doing this ?

I link to my sponsors using a 301 htaccess redirect. Not sure if you're familiar with that, but I find it extremely easy. I just point all links to something like http://swirlie.com/websites/blackonblackcrime.com/

I find it extremely easy to manage because each site is in it's own folder and alphabetized making it easy to find a site in case I need to swap out a link.

I know this isn't the exact answer you wanted, but I thought I'd throw out another option in case you were interested.

you might be able to hack something together so you can share prettylink dbs across all sites

That's a good idea. I might see what I can do with that.

In the end I decided to abandon prettylink for a short domain and self hosted url shortener.

or you could use the self hosted shortner yourls, then install the wp plugin which grabs the data from it. that way you would just need to install that small plugin to grab urls from your stand alone.

That's precisely what I'm going to do :)