301 unused domains to primary domain?

[D_Blackwell]

When I set up a new site, I usually buy up the .net, .org and any likely variants and just let them sit unused. Mostly I don't want anyone else to have them, and just let Go Daddy or another Registrar park them however they want. They aren't going to get any traffic and I have no interest in them, and, most likely, no one else will either. Just a cheap precaution.

However, I have a new product that it is important to one of my sites. I have the book title and author name; straight and hyphenated both, for .com, .net, and .org (twelve domains). I want to put all of the .com domains, leave the rest idle, and use .htaccess to 301 to the target page on the primary website wit the .coms

1) Any downside to putting the 301 to a targeted page, rather than the root index page?

2) Can I just use;
redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/directory/target-page.html

or should I at least create an actual index page and use;
redirect 301 /index.html et cetera

3) Our own page dedicated to this item is already ranking #2, right behind Amazon. Fairly new, it may bounce around, but I expect to land high on page 1, if not hold the #2 slot.

I don't actually expect any of these sites to see any traffic whatsoever (no reason for people to type in the domain names) - but I do expect people to be mightily upset when they realize that I have them. Neither the author nor the publisher bothered to snap up the title - which they could have done months ago in the planning stages. The author has her own website, but if the book is successful her name will have more value and I want it. I have an interest in both because we intend, and are well positioned, to sell more copies of this title than anybody, Amazon included.

I really don't want to build out any of the sites, even minimally, because my only interest is in locking up the best potential domain names. The .coms are going to be hosted on the same server - the only point is to permanently redirect the domain names to the target page of the primary website.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't even bother with any of this because the 'reserved domains' should not be of interest to anyone else. In this case, people that used poor judgment are, at some point, going to be upset. The author already is taking a questionable approach and clearly plans to retail as many copies as she can directly and make some real money above the, what, 5% royalty. We are the second or third largest distributor of the key products that the book is aimed at and were deliberately not included in any pre-sell efforts. We were aware of the project and bought several cases as soon as it was published and it is selling nicely; which helps the related merchandise sales. Also, we did hold off the domain name purchases until a full month and a half after publication!

It's an unusual situation for us, and we want to 'bullet proof' these sites from the dimwits that should have bought them long before publication.

We also want to avoid any accidental damage or penalty from Google. It's all up-and-up. One site, content rich, top ranking for every keyword or phrase that we want..... But, in this case we are needing to protect against 'encroachment' with some really good names that should not have been left out there.

All suggestions and 'best practice' tips are welcome.

[tedster]

Sure, use the 301. You might be surprised how much type-in traffic is actually available! No problem with redirecting to an internal page, either.

really good names that should not have been left out there.

There may eventually be an intellectual property issue here, but that's got nothing to do with SEO for Google.

[Robert Charlton]

The thing I'd be cautious about is to not promote any of the redirected domains. That might be considered manipulative by Google, particularly if there were a lot of them. I wouldn't hesitate, btw, to redirect the .net and .org domains as well.

I should mention something that many newcomers (including myself when I started out) are not familiar with. It's not necessary to have a separate hosting account for each of these domains. You can set the destination IP in your DNS A-records all to the host IP of your main domain and use mod_rewrite to do the redirects... all on one hosting account.