Today I am going to do a mini review of Human Ranked Directory Project. The main characteristic of this relatively new directory is that each site listed is assigned a rank, in other words it is rated by the administrators on a scale from one to ten. This isn’t an original idea since sites like JoeAnt have been doing that for quite some time however it’s not something common in the directory world. IMHO this could be used as a great viral linking tool, for example in their acceptance emails they could add a line saying Congratulation, bla bla bla Your site has been given a rating of x, feel free to display this button showing your rating at your site {code}. Of course the button will be linking back to the directory 
.
The design of the directory is simple but effective. Two things that caught my eye are:
1. They have decided to include the latest links at the front page (about 50 of them). At first I was surprised by this, but later I realised that the links don’t point at the sites but at the categories that the sites are listed, which in my opinion creates a great internal linking structure.
2. The not commercial categories and the categories that in most directories don’t receive a lot of submissions, like Art have very few subcategories while the commercial Categories like Business have a far more extensive subcategory structure. This is something that I generally agree with and I have talked about it previously in my category structure post. However I think in this case they have taken it a bit to the extreme.
The search engine saturation is good with about 2300 indexed pages by Google. The problem is that Google considers most of these pages similar. The reason is quite obvious, they have used the same meta description for all the pages of the directory. This is a mistake that even large directories like Skaffe seem to have made.
Let’s not forget our friends the PR obsessed. Human Ranked Directory is a PR4 directory, however the inner categories haven’t gotten any PR yet. I don’t know the reason for this but it’s probably because the directory is still new.
Conclusion: Do I recommend it? Yes I do, it’s free and the owners seem to have spend quite some time developing it. I don’t know if it a completely homemade script or a customised commercial directory script but it certainly isn’t the average cookie cutter directory and best of all it accepts free submissions.
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July 29th, 2006 at 5:25 am
hi dan,
many thanks for reviewing our site. I am pleased to hear some very truthful points you made, which i very much appreciate. The main focus of our directory is to maintain a quality site in organising web resources. Here are some of the unique features of our project.
1. Unique Site Design:
Custom made script with fine directory structure.
2. SEO Friendly:
Very friendly SEO pages, with all accepted sites given sitereport pages, which i believe very useful for search engines with necessary scores. Also each sitereport page given 10 keyword rich anchord links. We also accept sitemap and forums in this page, which we believe nice deeplinking pointed to external site. see: http://hrwebdir.org/sitereport2416.htm
4. Sitemap Linking:
Seen any directories linking to sitemap of external site? We believe sitemaps are more important than homepages, because most pages are accessible by just one jump from sitemap, which again makes search engines like Google, Yahoo easier to crawl.
5. Symbolic Pointers & Directory Structue:
Our directory has a good organised directory structure, with “symbolic pointing” is one of the most immportant feature our directory poesseses. we believe is one of the most important internal linking characterstic of directory structure.
for example if you want “merchant accounts” to appear in Business > Business Services > Ecommerce and in Computers > Internet > Ecommerce directories, you can either create subdirectory in one directory while the other can point as a symbolic link to it.
6.PageRank:
Our directory dont want to depend entirely of PR as we instead focus on creating quality resource than after search engine ranking.
7. Costs & Fee:
We are a very small community of persons, with limited resources started this project. We always wanted to keep this project as free. We reject about 70% of submissions. Current problems like lack of resources in funding and human factors, forces us to include paid options, we understood that we couldnt support ourself. We charge about $9.95 which we believe is not too much to ask.
8. Preventing SPAM:
We believe domain name spamming is one of the big problems many search engines face including google, besides MFA (Made for Adsense) site. We dont accept domain names with more than 3 keywords and MFA sites.
9. Quality & Trusted Sites.
The quality of a site cannot be truly measured by any search engines none other than humans themselves. This quality of a site assigned in a 10 point scale with max 9. That is our editors look for factors like (full contact address, BBB Reliability Report, SSL certs, Privacy Protected, excellent customer service live chat , toll free phone) which obviously good indicators of quality site and trusted site.
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Reasons for no PR assigned to our inner pages?
… This is because we changed our entire directory structure from directory paths to static file names of directories.