Site Listing History. http://www.abel.com.au

Hi I would like to inquire about the listing history of a web site (if any) the web address is http://www.abel.com.au, Site Name is Abel Rent a Car. The Site does not come up in any searhes with dmoz and I can not find it in any categories. I am concerned the previous owner asked or caused it to be removed in a state of confusion.

The site was removed because it did not fit our quality guidelines. If you changed that, feel free to resubmit it.

There was a bit of alias-URL spamming and shotgun spamming in its history, but apparently not enough to call for penalties. The problem is, as windharp mentioned, the site is absolutely useless for someone who actually wants to walk into a strange city and rent a car.

A lot of people think a website can stand alone, like a shop facade in a movie set. It's impossible: such a website would be a fraud, a con, a waste of everyone's time -- in a word, inherent spam. It can't. It's only the online presence -- the storefront on an electronic street -- of a real business.

So pretend you're a real customer, and looking for information on renting a car. You aren't going to deal with a strange company over the internet -- too many serial frauds out there -- but you do want to get an idea of what real companies there are, where they are, whether you can pick up a car at the bus station or the airport terminal or your hotel, or whether there's a courtesy van, or whatever.

Now go back to your site, and see how frustrated such a person would be by your multiple links that go to the same content-free hype. We don't want to offer that site as information, because it actually contains less information than a Phone Book's Yellow Pages or an ordinary business card! It looks like an unfinished site where all the links point to the same pointless 404 page.

I must disagree, Abel’s offer the best online internet pricing and complete online quoting system on the Web. If I was a real customer I would gladly, book and reserve a car with abel, I am not saying this for Abel's sake, but because I know there is a real business to walk to up and rent a car, because I am sitting up stairs of Head Branch.

>I must disagree, Abel’s offer the best online internet pricing and complete online quoting system on the Web. If I was a real customer I would gladly, book and reserve a car with abel, I am not saying this for Abel's sake, but because I know there is a real business to walk to up and rent a car, because I am sitting up stairs of Head Branch.

And how can I check that? I looked all over that website for the address of a single branch! I couldn't find one. I couldn't see any difference in the "Branch" pages -- as I said, they looked like custom 404 pages, all exactly the same. I looked all over for a single price for a car. Except for the nebulous and ubiquitous $29.95 graphic, I couldn't find one! I saw something that seemed to have been intended to be a phone number in another graphic, but there wasn't any identification for it.

We're not going to come to your office and run upstairs. We're going to look at the website and see if the information is there. And there's no reason for me not to find it if it's there. I almost started an internal investigation on the site, to see why it had been rejected -- the home page looked like the home page of a real website. Then I started following the links. And I know that at least two other editors did the same -- and at least two of us are not in competition with you in any form or fashion.

Feel free to check the site with some real internet browser -- lots of us use Mozilla or Opera; I won't let the Infernal Exploder through my firewall, because I won't risk the important data on my computer -- and you may be doing some propriatary database garbage rather than handling it on the server side. Or, if that's not the problem, feel free to finish the site with actual information on the company and the various city branches. And then check back here after a month or so.

You'll probably need to request a review in this forum, because at this point (with the site's history, alias-URL spamming and lack of content and all) a new submittal would probably be rejected out of hand.

But at this point I can pretty well guarantee that the site doesn't come close to meeting even our very liberal Regional guidelines.

Are you sure that you went to http://www.abel.com.au not some other knock off site. I checked site operation in Opera, (my main browser), Netscape 4, netscape 7 Internet Explorer 4 and 6. to me the site operation is working fine.


Every Car Listed has every price listed on every deal, Three differnet rate stuctures, 100k, Unlimited, and Package Deals.... No 29.95 price is listed at all...

feel free to email a screen shot and what you are talking about...

Office Locations & numbers
text as taken form the site...

Brisbane Airport
Corner Nudgee Road and East
West Arterial
Hendra, Qld. Australia
Phone: 07 3868 2299
Fax: 07 3868 2483

Brisbane City
Transit Centre Roma Street
Brisbane City, Qld. Australia
Phone: 07 3236 1225
Fax: 07 3236 1209
7.00am - 7.00pm 7 days a week

Melbourne Airport
Mickleham Road
Tullamarine, Vic, Australia
Phone: 03 9335 6181
7.00am - 7.00pm 7 days a week.

My only thought of what is wrong with the address are that in Australia, we do not work on numbers all the time, if you have never been here you would not understand, but guaranteed, if you got in a cab and said "Corner Nudgee Road and East West Arterial" or "Mickleham Road" the cab driver would drop you off at very location very time... not unless our 1/8th mile long streets are too difficult to work out..

I think I'm seeing what everyone else is seeing:

If, for example, I click on any of the cities listed, I would expect to see contact information for those cities at the very least but all we get are pages with no relevent information on them (e.g. http://www.abel.com.au/brisbane.asp) and, I'm sorry but what is with all the hidden links in the middle of those location pages that lead to other car rental sites?

I think the problem here is that your main site page is not very user-friendly -- you have a lot of (presumably) SEO junk that makes it look as though you have no content when I see that if someone bothers to click on the "Hi, I'm Georgie" link (which takes them to http://www.abel.com.au/home.asp ), they'll actually reach what appears to be the meat of the site. It shouldn't be that hard for people to see the site's actual content -- don't make the mistake of trading your site's functionality for a little SEOing.

This forum is not for site critiques, but I can see where this is coming from so....remove editor hat.

I think one of the problems here is you are checking your own work.

If you enter the site click on one of the alleged locations on the front page.

All of them go to an exactly the same looking page with zero information http://www.abel.com.au/brisbane.asp and http://www.abel.com.au/sydney.asp and http://www.abel.com.au/melbourne.asp all look the same except some have even more links going to the same lookalike no content page http://www.abel.com.au/sunshinecoast.asp , http://www.abel.com.au/goldcoast.asp , etc.

I'll accept you have locations listed - although not as obviously as you seem to believe. Also I don't see the point in listing locations that don't exist yet.

I live in SA and haven't heard of the company so I'd be a little wary as a consumer. (NB very personal opinion).

I can't see a $29.95 price either, but I can see a *very* large sign on each page that says "From $29* a day"

When I first went to the site I went through several of the entry pages before clicking on the map which is the actual entry. Sorry but that's what user testing should have done.

Also as a user I'd like to know what vehicles are considered 'or similar'. If I wanted to hire a Porsche boxter I'd be mighty annoyed if 'or similar' was a MGF. They might both be fast convertibles, but I'd like to know what I'm renting.

Also remember that if you are marketing to non Australian users they will not have the same vehicle names - adding more vehicle information may help your sales conversions to that demographic.

As I said - not talking as an editor here, just a user who does not have the site structure already embedded.

The $29 versus $29.95 was my bad. Sorry for that confusion -- American prices nearly always end with 9.95 rather than 9.00 and so my memory thought the pennies could be discarded and reconstructed.

I finally found the office locations, behind two layers of links without the customary visual clues. I can certainly see why other editors thought the site had no content: clicking on all the visually-cued links without apparent effect.

This isn't the place for site critiques, but I think this needs to be said: the site was reviewed by multiple sympathetic editors: its horrible design, and probably that alone, kept the site from being listed. You need to find your website designer, and shoot him. Not in the head, of course: aim for the vital organs.

If you think that ODP editors might be ganging up on you (I don't, I think you got some valuable user feedback) then get an independant site review over at some other forum like www.searchengineforums.com/ where they have a whole section dedicated to doing just that.

First of all I must thank everyone for their opinions and advice given, I know the importance of time, and how much of a depleting resource it is to all of us. So once again THANK YOU.

The detailed observations are just outstanding and I praise everybody who has submitted a reply.

I can clearly see the error in the workings of the locations, and I am still sitting here dumb founded that I had not even noticed. There is NO excuse for my ignorance in this mater; habit should never take pride of place. (Two years of just clicking the Map).

In car rental, vehicle types are all ways subject to “or similar” (eg. http://www.Avis.com) would certainly have the vehicle listed “or similar”.

The “or similar” is displayed under the duress of both the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) and The Office of Fair Trading, and it needs to meet there guidelines, Example, I could replace the Porsche with a vehicle of equivalent “group”. I could not replace boxter with an MG, however I could replace the Holden (opel) Astra with a MG, ( in saying that the only time you would not receive the vehicle you booked is if we are updating our fleet, we would have to replace the booked vehicle with a vehicle that is of the same size, age, number of seats & doors (or a vehicle that is bigger/better or newer). If you booked the MG, you could receive a FREE upgrade to the Porsche Boxter, but we could NOT down grade you to the MG if you had booked the Porsche Boxter.

So once again THANK YOU to all the detailed observations and replys that are just outstanding. THANK YOU