walkman - 6:41 pm on Jun 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

Just small sites with products and simple on-site seo. There could be as many as 50 of them.

Google will probably not like that, seem like too many subdomains to be honest. How about splitting the site into 2-3 and use different domains and keep them as separate as possible?

If Google sees your site with 50 subdomains and if they don't like it, you're out again since they will probably penalize the entire domain.