[windharp]

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

[hutcheson]

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.

[hutcheson]

>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.

[motsa]

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.

[hutcheson]

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.

[hutcheson]

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.

[giz]

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.