Recently I had someone try to sell me a domain name with keywords in it for my company website. After searching around I haven't found much information on if this will help or hurt my website rankings/traffic. My websites domain is both partners of the company's last names. Ok so if lets say my site companyname.com deals with cookies would be a good idea to buy up the domains cookies-city1.com cookies-city2.com cookies-city3.com cookies-city4.com and then have a copy of my company website on each one or just have them forward to my company site. Does anyone know if google looks at this practice as negative?
Looking at the continuous evolution of Google strategy, google has started giving less prominence to sites which expect rankings only on the basis of Keywords in their domain name. U must try to focus on your company-name.com site, rather that acquiring new domains, and then distributing your focus on all of them. And the way you are saying, that you will replicate content on those sites, I don't think you can reap great benefits that way. Instead try focusing on your primary domain.
The best strategy would be to make skin sites i.e. small landing sites for your product. Now these are small sites and would be focused on long tail keywords for a specific niche. Getting them ranked for those niche keywords and generating traffic would be easy for them. Once you get traffic on them, you can redirect that traffic to the main company website by giving text links and banners from the skin sites. Building a network of websites to generate traffic to the parent site is a well known SEO technique. But make sure all the sites have unique content.