Reviews

Review: BestRomanticInns

A frequent email solicitor, the site BestRomanticInns.com also advertises under GreatWeddingVenues.com as well as ConventionsMeetings.com. That certainly doesn’t start the review process off on the right foot. The emails are sent using a third party, emailbrain.com, and therefore are full of tracking links. This is a bad practice. Track visits at the website, but don’t use actual email tracking links. As a matter of best practices, using email tracking links is becoming more objectionable each day. As a matter of fact, the current MS spam filtering standards semi-automatically dump emails with tracking links into “Junk Email” folders in outlook, which makes them that less likely to be read, or trustworthy. Putting that aside, the sites themselves are bare-bones and resemble article directories. The categories are not refined enough to be really useful, some regions included almost one hundred properties listed in the narrowest category. The links to the inn websites would be at 4 clicks, except that they are coded wrong and include email tags, which makes them crash on several inns (if they parse URIs for example). Inn pages have good image presentation, but are overwhelmed with other information and graphics in both sidebars, dwarfing the text content of the inns page, which is boring and not well organized. They brag that they are #1 in Google for the search “Romantic Inns”, which they are, however add almost any descriptor to that query (a more likely search would be “Romantic Inns New England” for example) and they fall down or off page one completely. I personally dislike “Google bragging” and think that they are well placed for many searches with the term Romantic Inn, but don’t brag about being number one on an unused search.

The Good: The site is clean up to the state search pages and has nice image maps for the states allowing you to narrow the search to a region. The result page is clean and easy to read.

The Bad: Broken (miscoded as email links) website links for every inn on main page of each category. Internal pages are crowded by 2 sidebars full of images and more links. Complicated packages including news releases(?) and multi site packages. “Google Bragging” about high rankings on obscure search terms. Category pages (listings in a region) are long and in some cases scroll through pages of inns. Offer another way to narrow the search.

My Ratings:

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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 7 years
Main Page Pagerank: 5
Number of Inbound Links: 2,401
AlexaRank: 891,140
Alternate Domain Names: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes.
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $69
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $325.

Notes about Packages and Membership: The packages range from a simple web link only listing, at $69 to multi site listings including a press release service for $325. The press release service seems to be PRWeb, which distributes content for syndication on the web and occasionally for print. This service is available privately as well, and in a limited fashion is provided for free via PRWeb directly.

The Site: www.bestromanticinns.com
Review Date: January 2008

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