I have a client who's just asked me to produce more work. Brilliant! However, what he's asking me to do is slightly strange, and I think it might ultimately prove detrimental to his existing site.

Here are the basics. He has an existing e-commerce site that's based in the UK. The site is doing pretty well, and has seen 20% improvement in sales since my redesign although he's seen some fluctuation in google positioning. He also has business interests in Malaysia.

He wants me to produce an additional site hosted on a Malaysian server, though it will only have a single page which will be very similar to the UK homepage with some alterations. This new page, will naturally be catered towards the Malaysian market. However, any links within this page will direct the user back to the UK site.

So.... I'm in two minds about this, it's perfectly understandable for businesses to have multiple sites/domains for each of the countries that their business operates within. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this might class as a doorway page and may have a negative effect on his UK site's ranking.

Any opinions? Advice?

Naturally, I loathe to turn away business... I'd like to let him know of the potential problem and let him make the ultimate decision.

I think that as long as the "doorway" site isn't loaded with irrelevant keywords, you should be fine. Google should be smart enough to understand when you're redirecting customers from company.my to company.co.uk. It should even see the relevance between the contents of the two sites.