Owning multiple unestablished domains and redirecting to one domain

Question

If I was to own multiple unestablished domain names such as abc.com xyz.com hij.co.uk etc... for the purpose of keeping them away from my competitors, and then I was to 301 redirect them to one domain; is this classed as black hat SEO?

I don't think it will be classed as link scheming because there is no website at these domains, they are just redirecting.

Could I get penalised for owning multiple domains?

Does anyone know of any reliable links such as Google Webmasters Guidelines that explains why this is bad and what affect it can have from an SEO perspective?

Answer 1

This is actually quite a common practice, be careful though, while it is perfectly acceptable to do this for common mis-speellings of your own domain name to keep your competitors from grabing them as well as your own domain name under multiple TLD's.

Where you will encounter problems is with Cyber Squatting. This is where you are registering, trafficking in, or using an Internet domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price. This is an offense under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act which is a US law.