About six months or so ago, I got a phone call for a sales person who was working on behalf of Forbes.com. The sales person was selling web pages on the Forbes.com site, hosted advertisements if you will, in which the purchaser could add their own links, banners and content if they would like. We declined the offer.

The cost was in the thousands, but the intent of the company selling the space was obvious – take a large, trusted domain like Forbes.com and have that domain host hundreds of doorway pages that lead to the sites of advertisers. I’m sure the logic was that the hosted pages would rank well for competitive terms and that the links on those pages would eventually pass some pretty good link juice – and quite truthfully, that logic seems to have paid off.

This is not a new tactic, I’ve seen people use off-topic doorway pages on popular domains in the past…and at times the tactic was very effective. But to me this is different because the site is so well known and trusted by the search engines (as it should be). Companies are free to do what they want with their domains, but you’d think a company like Forbes, with a strong reputation for authority on financial matters wouldn’t want that kind of garbage on their site. I mean, c’mon, if your going to allow people to host spam pages on your domain, at least make them create pages that don’t look like they were put together by someone who’s 5 pages into the HTML for Dummies book.

Am I out of line here? Should Forbes continue to sell hosted doorway pages or do you think this practice should stop? Does anyone but me even care? :)

End of rant.