Reviews

Review: A-ZHotels.Net

A-ZHotels.Net has emailed us possibly more than any other directory. Unfortunately prior to now, we havent been tracking the number of emails we have received from each advertiser, but we have started to do so in 2008. A-ZHotels.net emails are often borderline broken English and always include bizarre capitalized words and bold sentences. As for their website, I was surprised to find that it is fairly attractive at first glance. A clean front page included quick links to popular cities and a simple flash animated slideshow (of course, if these photos were of participating properties and were identified in the slides it would have earned points, but currently it appears to just be stock photos). The search function was somewhat useless, unable to find CT or VT or NH, I realized that only spelling out the states found results. Of course, these results were listed in a small grouping that is given about 60% of the pagewidth, shared with lists of nearby and local towns as well as a wordy gentleman who spews keywords… To top that off, the actual website links are masked, no pagerank being shared here (don’t worry, there wasn’t much for them to share anyhow). The listings include more broken English / wordy descriptions and seem to require you to fill out a form to get any details or even a phone number (on all but “Platinum” listings). Site claims over 90k visitors per week, but based on the Alexa rank and the PR, I would doubt that is true. In an interesting irony, the “Join” scripts are not cross browser compatible and utilize goofy and unnecessary scripting. Top it all off with an oddball domain name and I say, save your money.

The Good: Attractive layout is contemporary and clean. Google maps were well integrated and loaded quickly. Template has great potential.

The Bad: Search is all but useless. Doesn’t suggest terms, just fails on searches that aren’t exact matches. Phone numbers, when listed, are displayed awkwardly (its a European site). Text sizes are small and site text is wordy and keyword stuffed. Contact form to get phone numbers is unlikely to lead to many calls. Oddly refers to all listings as “Special Offers”. No map based search or drop down search, must start with selecting United States then typing a state name into search. City search only seeks exact matches.

Our Inn Results: We do not pay for advertising on this site and welcome results from some folks who do.

My Ratings:

Overall Average:
Site Design:
Site Content:
Site Usability:
Site Reach:
Browser:
Clicks to Link:
Internal Pagerank:
Credibility / QA:
Value:

The Stats:
Age of Domain: 1 year
Main Page Pagerank: 3
Number of Inbound Links: 204
AlexaRank: 1,509,741
Alternate Domain Names: No
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - starting at the $20 / month package
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $156
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $240
Notes about Packages and Membership: 2 packages to chose from, gold and platinum. The gold package is $14 per month and the platinum is $20 per month. The main difference according to the website is the position on the search result pages.

The Site:www.a-zhotels.net
Review Date: January 22, 2008

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