[ThePokerBank]

Just to give an example, lets say that you intend on creating a series of mini-sites with only around 30 or so pages each. The sites will have the same layout design, but will have different colour schemes. All the content will be original, and because they will all be like sister-sites, you will be interlinking them from the top of each page so that users can jump between the sites in the collection.

My question is, would it be best to no follow these links between each of the sites in the collection?

The idea of linking each of the sites together is for the benefit of the user, and I'm thinking that seeing that each site clearly links to each other site in the mini-network, it might be viewed as an attempt to manipulate rankings in the search engines. So from a purely white-hat perspective, is the nofollow attribute best used in this case?

I'm not sure if this would be being overly cautious of a penalty that wouldn't even occur, but I would be interested in hearing some thoughts.