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Any help would be very useful. :)
Apparently from what I've heard large numbers of domains pointing to a single site is seen as spam by most search engines.
Yes, there have been discussions about this here at the forums. If those domains are returning a 200 Okay status in the server header, then yes, there may be some issues.
However what if there were domains with the name being directly related (to the category), redirecting to individual pages or categories of a site.
Back in the days, this was a strategy which proved to be successful if done properly. These days, technology has improved to the point where I would be skeptical about utilizing this approach.
What search engines if any would pick up these as seperate sites and is this considered spam?
Probably all of the majors at this point in time. If they didn't pick it up, a competitor most likely would. It is not a situation you want to put yourself into. It may work short term, but the long term consequences are not worth it.
If you have a site that deals with many different products and you can logically break those down into uniquely different content, then multiple sites may be an option. These days though, many will recommend that you consolidate everything under one domain and organize your site appropriately.
A very large site might have 100 canonicals...
product1.example.com
product2.example.com Or they may utilize the sub-directory approach...
www.example.com/product1/
www.example.com/product2/ It's okay to have a few domains pointing to your site. I'm referring to those instances where you are capturing type-in traffic or misspellings. Those domains would be set up with a 301 Moved Permanently status. This way they won't get indexed and will automatically redirect your visitor to the proper domain.