Lets say I wanted to buy up a series of say 5 keywords as URLS and point them all to one page Would this be a disasterous and monstrous faux pas with G and thus a huge cock up?
I think it depends on how you "point" them. As far as I know, the way to do this without the risk of a penalty would be to use 301 redirects.
Ok well I was thinking just using links. Rather than 301s is that not a bit fairer on the customer or should I just be agressive and get the coders to run 301 and 302s?
If it were me... I'd just build 5 slightly different landing pages and point each of the 5 urls to a different landing page. It isn't that much work and each of the 5 pages can (read SHOULD) be tweaked for each keyword set. I've done this where I've even replicated a primary site multiple times and tweaked every page in the site (well, only 5 or 6 page sites so not a ton of work). If your going to spend the money for the url's... go the extra mile and really optimize it. The payoff will be better and the G factor can work in your favor this way.
2 4 6 8 who do we appreciate....yaaaaayyy Like a fool my google rankings were skewed today stupid me not thinking that the "personal user settings " were showing... bastardssssssssssssss