When are doorway domains not doorways?

[pmarsh]

Looking over a new client's setup it seems they have the following.

One main domain : superfoos.com

And a bunch of others that are related to categories of products superfoos.com offers such as:
superwidgets.com
superbars.com
superwhatevers.com

Now those side sites just pull information from superfoos.com database and have a single page listing out widgets, bars, whatevers. Each widget links back to superfoos.com for a full description.

Right now superwidgets.com et al have PR 4. They've been around for years but I worry that they are doorway domains and one day the SE's will realize this and penalize the main site.

Is this an acceptable practice? Do these side sites need more content to be considered valid? Such as full descriptions available on the side site?

Thanks for any thoughts!

[eniram]

Currently your fears are correct, eventually it could come back to haunt your client.
Yes, more content and if at all possible the full descriptions need to also be served from same domain.
Are they using an e-commerce platform? Which one?

[pmarsh]

More of a referral company, so no standard e-commerce package. An ugly custom PHP platform is what runs things.

Anyone happen to know if Google actively polices these types of pages? Or do they wait for a report to come in?

What I'm thinking for a fix is only redirect them to the main site to create accounts etc. Still would have me worried though.

[Fret-Less]

I agree. It's better to be safe than sorry. Have more content on the individual sites.