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The reason for leaving the homepage is purely branding.  It will eventually be redirected to the holding company's site. Thanks for the help.  Great point of view on how it could be viewed as negative SEO in the 'bots' of Google. -Greg

I don't numbers as a % of the total market but after having a quick look at a large sample on an e-commerce site I found around 1 wildcard per 70,000 searchers. Of those only 1 in 20 actually look like they're deliberately using it as a wildcard.