I would regard this as actually being more dangerous than beneficial. You should be very careful about introducing lots of links from lots of new sites.

Bare in mind that links from new sites could happen once or twice, completely naturally, that is the way of the web. But if it becomes a large part of your websites link profile then it will do no good at all.

Above all else, beware of footer and sitewide links from new domains to your domain.

Matt

It would mean duplicated content if you kept the description the same, yep. However, there are many ways of saying the same thing... You would have to rewrite the descriptions for sure.

Whether or not it would give your website any benefit is hard to say without knowing which product it was you were thinking about splitting down and which keywords you were targeting for that product.

As an example. One of the sites I am working on sells plastic chains. We optimise the category page for the main plastic chain keywords, within the category we add the products and split them up based on colour. This allows us to target long-tail keywords such as "Green Plastic Chain". This benefits us because (even though they are fairly low) there are people searching for this term. If nobody is searching for your product in a specific colour then there is no real advantage other than having more content on your site.

On the other side of the coin, it does mean more clicks for visitors. As we know, more clicks often means losing visitors. The only real answer is to test test test. I always recommend using a combination of both methods after lots of testing and analysing.

Hope this helps?

Matt