FAQ
Got a question that’s not covered here? Ask me directly using the contact form.
How should I use the information on Mental About Rental?
This directory aims to help you make decisions about where to list your rental property. When it comes to directories, big isn’t necessarily best. A niche directory which is a perfect fit for your property and which ranks highly for the right search terms might only get a few hundred visitors a month, but could provide you with the majority of your bookings. That’s why we try to provide you with as much information as possible, encourage directory owners to share traffic information, and encourage rental owning visitors to share their experiences of listing with each directory. At the end of the day, the more information you have, the more informed decisions you can make.
What determines the order of the directories on the home page?
The most recently added directories appear on the home page at the top, as this website uses Wordpress, and displays results in reverse cronological order. If you subscribe to the RSS feed on the homepage, this will ensure you’re alerted each time a new directory is added.
Why can’t I comment?
You need to be registered and logged in to comment against a directory. This is to ensure good quality comments and alleviate spam.
I’ve submitted a comment and it’s not showing up. Why?
We manually process all comments, so your comment is held for moderation before appearing on the site. We try to get to them as soon as physically possible. Occasionally we don’t allow certain comments through if we feel they’re off topic, offensive, libellous or don’t add value to other site users.
Why can’t I rate a directory?
The rating system avoids duplicate rating (i.e. people trying to cheat by rating a directory more than once) by logging the IP address. If you are visiting Mental About Rental from a computer used by someone else, it may be that they’ve already rated that directory, in which case, you will not be able to rate again. Additionally, if you’re rating from work, it may be that someone else on the same IP group has rated the directory, which will cause the same problem.
I’ve submitted my directory and it’s not showing up. Why?
We manually review all the submissions and then have to create the page with your directory on it. This can take time, especially if we’re innundated with submissions. You can help us to help you by providing us with the screengrab images we need (x2) in the right format and file size. Additionally, please make your description as comprehensive as possible and try to format it in a nice way. If we’re able to cut and paste, we all save time.
How do I remove my directory from the system?
Drop me a line using the contact form explaining the reason why, and I’ll look into it with you.
What is your privacy policy?
It’s pretty simple. We don’t use your email address for anything other than your registration and if we need to contact you regarding your account. If in future we decide to send out marketing emails, we will add a seperate form onto the website inviting users to sign up to the newsletter.
My Directory is listed on Mental About Rental but I want to add some details. How do I do that?
Please use the form provided on the Submit A Directory and make clear in the description that you’re UPDATING an existing description. Please note that as I’m focusing mainly on adding directories to the database, there may be a small fee for description updates.
Where do you get your directory traffic estimates from?
I believe that if you’re selling advertising (i.e. listings) on your directory website, you should disclose your traffic figures. Only accurate traffic figures will give the buyer accurate information on which to base their buying decision. In any other form of media, the ’selling’ publication is obliged to provide audited circulation or viewer figures before anyone will buy advertising space. Why should the online holiday rental market be any different?
Until such point as directories provide Mental About Rental with independently audited traffic information, we’ll use the following suppliers as ‘estimated’ traffic indicators:
- Compete.com provides estimated monthly traffic data for the US market (i.e. the estimated unique visitors to the website from the US
- Google Trends shows the traffic driven to a website through search over a period of time, without showing actual traffic figures.
Unfortunately, the 3rd party measurement tools are still incomplete, although if Compete ever begins to deliver international data that will prove to be extremely useful and fairly accurate. In the meantime, the data should be used to benchmark one directory against the next.
If you own a directory and want to provide our users with accurate data, you have two options;
1. You can post your version of your site traffic in the comments against your directory
2. If you want accurate data adding to your description, we provide an independent auditing service for a small fee, but insist on auditing the figures ourselves before adding this information to your directory description.
How do you calculate MARG (Mental About Rental Guestimate)?
The MARG is a guestimate of average total monthly traffic (not just US). This is calculated as follows: We look at the US data on Compete.com, and take an average of the 12 months. We then look at the website’s data on Google Trends, and by measuring the pixels against each country, we estimate the % of total traffic that the US figure is providing. By doing so, we’re then able to Guestimate what the total monthly number of unique users is for the website globally. Genuis huh? Probably not, but it’s better than nothing!
Because of the way MARG is calculated, we cannot provide a MARG if :
- the site doesn’t show in compete.com
- the site doesn’t show in Google Trends
- the site doesn’t show US data in Google Trends