SEO Hack highlighted some potential downfalls to launching a movie on a separate domain:
The only problem I see with going the micro-site route is that they're starting from scratch with a domain, which sucks for building link pop. Second, the movie name isn't always available, so they end up with some weird-ass name that they have to work to brand as part of the movie too. If they work with just adding it to the current site hierarchy, they get all the link-generation the movie buzz would build as well as the ability to use existing link pop to help usher spiders to content. Plus, since the studio's domain already has age, they're not fighting that battle...though, I would guess that they buy a domain and start building age for it as soon as they have a project, assuming that the movie's title doesn't change.He makes a good point about the movie name not necessarily being available. Some studios try to get cute and register an obscure URL, like "lameassjokemikemyersmakesinthemovie.com" instead of "lovegurumovie.com". For linking purposes it's generally a best practice to include your keyword in your URL if possible--that way, when people use the URL as the anchor text, the keyword's already built in. However, I don't see starting from scratch as a huge problem for movie studios looking to market their new movie. If the movie has built buzz for a while, it shouldn't be too hard for the site to rank for the movie's name. Plus, if the studio links to the new site, they're funneling some of their hearty link juice over to the new web property.
My concern had more to do with what happens to a movie website after the film's had its theatrical run. These websites pretty much sit there and rot, collecting dust and being largely forgotten. Take The Love Guru, for example. This movie looks like a heaping, steaming pile of excrement, and apparently the moviegoing public agrees with me because it took 4th in the box office its opening weekend, grossing less than $15 million. Undoubtedly the movie will leave theaters pretty quickly, and Paramount, the studio that put out the film, will move onto promoting its next batch of coming attractions. Its website will be abandoned, maybe updated slightly once the DVD comes out, but overall it will be ignored.
However...The Love Guru's website has almost 15,000 links pointing to it. That's a LOT of links. What if, after the movie's theatrical run, Paramount (whose website has over 250,000 links) redirected www.lovegurumovie.com to a page on Paramount's website (e.g., paramount.com/movies/loveguru)? This page could have information about the movie such as its plot, cast information, images, video clips/movie trailers, merchandise, and DVD information. Now, imagine if 2 years from now I catch The Love Guru on the USA Network. For some unholy reason I find the film to be incredibly hilarious (play along now, it could happen...if I'm drunk). I go online and do a search for "the love guru" in order to read more about the movie. Ranked at the top of the search results (hopefully beating imdb.com, but possibly ranked underneath it) is Paramount's Love Guru page. I click on the result and read information about the movie. On the same page is a section that says "Other upcoming comedies coming to theaters." I check out the list and think, "Hey, these movies look pretty funny. When do they come out?" When one of the advertised movies (most likely Shrek 9 [*rolls eyes*]) comes to a theater near me, I flock to a sticky floored cavern near me and dump my $10 directly into Paramount's pocket.
Thus, the redirect strategy would be beneficial to Paramount for long tail search term ranking and as a way to promote upcoming releases. As an SEO, I see this as a great opportunity for movie studios. However, Syzlak and Hack were quick to provide a cruel reality check:
Hack: Do the movie studios care about their sites in search? How many of them are doing it that intelligently or care?
Syzlak: Why should studios care about an old movie? They're already focused on promoting the next film. They're thinking, "I don't care about Elizabeth the Golden Age, I'm all about Zohan now."Well, you could make that argument about a lot of businesses who don't understand SEO or know about the value/benefits of it. However, you could also make the case that clearly the current system seems to be working fine. Generally, movie studios don't have a tough time getting their individual movie websites to rank and drive traffic. And I'm sure they have dozens of other releases to worry about, so implementing an SEO strategy on a site for a movie that they don't care about any more seems like a low priority. Maybe I've just been doing SEO for too long and I see a great opportunity that in reality isn't that huge a priority.
Still...I can't help myself. Think about how many long tail searches a movie studio could pull in if they were to redirect all of their movie websites to pages on their studio site. They could compete with imdb.com and cross-promote their other films on these pages. Plus, all of the links that a site accrues before and during its theatrical run wouldn't go to waste. Seems like a no brainer, right? What do you think? Am I onto something here, or is it just the SEO in me trying to complicate a marketing strategy that already works pretty well for movie studios? Are studios missing out on a great opportunity? Do they even care?
I actually do SEO for one of the major movie houses and it is a blend between missed opportunity and the I Don't Cares. The move site has two life cycles. The first is when it released in theatres and the second is when it is released to DVD. The theatrical team doesn’t care about the site after the movie opens and couple weeks before it goes to DVD the Home Entertainment team takes over.
One major issue is the sites are in flash and the developers and studios want to keep them straight flash. (no blended html) This means the best we can do is create compelling titles and meta tags along with content that lives in div layers behind the flash.
Another issue is there are several different creative firms that create the flash sites and some will upload the reconditions while other won't. Also being a vendor for a client who is advising other vendors for the same client can be a nightmare (especially when you are creating extra work for them.)
I have pushed and pushed to get a centralized location for movie pages within the main corporate site. Vanity websites (like latestblockbustermovie.com) will still be necessary for marketing however the stand alone sites are only live a couple weeks before the movie premier and rankings for more generic searches such as the actor name or movie character name rarely gain traction before the premiere.
heheheeh, i was gonna' make a comment on if they even care if the things are crawlable! that answers that!
Green Giant, that's really interesting. I'd love to hear more about your experience doing SEO for a "major movie house," as you put it. Can you go more in depth about the roadblocks you run into and some of the recommendations that you make that they actually follow, or is that getting too specific?
Great idea Rebecca! A YOUmoz post perhaps?
I think it would be neat for all of the in-house SEOs to give us a "day in the life" kind of post.
I've had some more thoughts on this topic since yesterday. Take the following scenarios:
1. The Love Guru fails at the box office (hard to believe I know), and then you want to capitalize on the links. For...Paramount? After spending $62 million on the film, you think they even want to be known as the ass-clowns that put that movie in a theater instead of on your next JetBlue flight? They'll push it to DVD real quick and then forget it was ever made. Hell they might even sell the rights of the movie to another studio. This happens all the time in the music industry, why do you think Rhino has such a large catalog? Aside from various now defunct record labels, they went out and secured the rights to a lot of what the big labels thought was unmarketable crap. ...and a lot of crap in general ;)
2. Viral marketing plays a role in all this too. If I'm a studio advertiser promoting my big summer comedy, I would buy bouillabaseball.com and create a web/widget-based game based upon the Melmac pastime a year ahead of my upcoming ALF movie. Hell AlftheMovie.com wouldn't even exist before hand. I'd just have the bouillabaseball site for the time being to get everyone amped up. There'd be online leagues, customizable players, etc. Then eventually, it'd funnel traffic to the movie site and people would be all amped from having played the game for a year. The game built the brand that is the movie, which built the brand that is the studio. However, you can switch the word 'built' with 'destroy' just as easily in said industry.
Re: Point #1
Is there really any harm done to the studio if theloveguruthemoviewithmikemyers.com redirects to the studio's domain? I'm just not sure a person's thought process would be: Oh man, I'm never watching another movie from that studio again!
Maybe it would also make sense to just redirect to Blockbuster, though :)
Edit: Thumbs up to you.
Like this genius idea? *waits for Highlander remake to come out*
this is the best post i've read here ever. well done, Rebecca! =)
i think a lot of them will take the path of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. they don't care about the website - they're making money off the film. and they still see the interweb as the enemy.
if it looks fancy and artsy fartsy, good enough for them.
oh, and i agree, if they're gonna' have one of those sites, when it's had its day in the sun, redirecting it to their site makes a helluva' lot of sense. i just think they don't care.
Agreed, they don't care or they don't know - but in the end they don't see it as broke.
The promotion of movies is an institution: trailers and one-sheets months before the movie comes out, leaks to the press during production, maybe a showing at Sundance or Cannes, then a round of newspaper and magazine interviews for the stars, then comes a red-carpet premier, maybe a limited release, finally the week before the wide release we get all the stars on Letterman, Leno, O'brien and Ferguson.
Plus - the stars individual publicists glom on and promote their stars.
(I was wondering why I was seeing all these weird off the wall Jason Bateman stories recently - it turns out he has a movie coming out! Hancock starring Will Smith - July 2)
Millions and millions of dollars is spent on this process.
A proper well-thought out URL strategy might give them a return of a few hundred thousands of dollars.
They aren't going to stop doing what they're doing for that little impact. They're focusing on the big numbers.
And its too bad, because long term - the studios could be saving themselves some of the money they're giving to IMDB, Myspace and others to promote a movie.
excellent point, hack. they don't care. and i think you just inspired a new term: interwebemy?
eh?
eh?
aw...fail.
no fail. anything that is inspired by me is AWESOME by default. ;)
If the movie companies do ever get low on cash, they seem to jump on the RIAA bandwagon :(
Question...
If they did as you suggested but didn't keep the site up to date, wouldn't the bots be able to tell that it had been idle for awhile. Then when other sites pop up with references to that particular movie that are more relevant (imdb, youTube, other random sites...) and up to date, wouldn't that original website fall off the radar? Would it still be doing the 'parent' site any good?
i think that's a good point, and more of a reason to have the movie details on the parent company's site than on their own domain. Unless that movie gets some sort of cult classic status, who the hell cares about it? the studio will abandon the movie-site and it'll be left to litter the interweb.
Great post Rebecca!
I thought about addressing this topic ages ago with a dedicated blog called movie-seo.com or similar and basically analysing each release's website and analysing how they could do better. It'd be like seo reviews and film reviews all in one! In the end though I decided I didn't have the time and that actually it would end up something like:
Spiderman - don't use flash. Good film.
Spiderman 2 - seriously. Don't use flash. Mediocre film.
Spiderman 3 - FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WON'T THESE PEOPLE LISTEN TO ME!!!!!! WHY PUT THE WHOLE THING IN FLASH!!? FILM SUCKS.
Anyway - don't know why I chose to share that, nice post :-)
https://incrediblehulk.marvel.com/
Seriously guys - you know you can do ummm things like ummm imgaes using a little thing we like to call HTML right? Took me 8 seconds just to load the flash which contains a link which says enter site. Oh, great I thought by loading the page I was entering the site. Evidently not!
Despite this though they still out-rank the old film so I guess they'll never care that much.
Hahah, perfect thought process with Spiderman. I love it.
increasingly, i've noticed movie studios re-aligning to make their movies available through online channels after the theatre release (and eventually monetize, although i'm not sure if they've got that 100% sorted yet).
in a twist on the "redirect the microsite to a sub-directory of the studio's domain", they could 301 the microsite to whatever distribution channel they've inked a deal with.
e.g. redirect this:
https://www.the40yearoldvirgin.com/
to this:
https://www.hulu.com/the-40-year-old-virgin
I just had a dream where I was going through my Bloglines, and when I came to SEOmoz -- get this -- there was a post that featured SEO Hack and Syzlak! Can you imagine??!!
Alright, just had to share. I'm gonna go get some coffee.
heheheheh, i think it's a sign hell has frozen over! =)
I think you're right that this would be a good idea - I even like launching it on the main domain. However, since there seems to be a preference for flash sites with no navigation, spiderable text or even, often, title tags, I think we have a fair way to go for most of the studios...
In terms of the profitabilty of traffic, wouldn't they want to rank for all the merchandise terms? As well as DVD etc.
This. Very much this. Whenever I go to a movie site it has the feel of being designed by picasso and built by a 4 year old. Beautiful but completely unusable and breaks when you touch it.
I think you make a good point Rebecca that there's all those links there waiting to be harnessed but I think more importantly they should focus on social media more. I mean getting a film trailer onto the digg homepage is FREE ADVERTISING and it's advertising to your target market too!
This is why we love you Rebecca. Let me just say that.
Oh, and one other thing. I'm glad I had time to digest the steaming hot bacon, double, chili cheeseburger I woofed down for lunch before I read that.
I have to agree with others on the short-term thinking issue with movie studios. When your job is to pump out crap as fast as you can, sometimes you just want to flush and move on.
I saw something similar recently with syndicated media. A couple of months ago, I linked to a Dilbert cartoon (I was a good boy and didn't copy and repost it); less than a month later, I realized the link was broken. United Media didn't archive anything for more than 30 days! Here are people legitimately doing long-tail searches to find their content, and they had completely removed it and destroyed their SEO in one fell swoop. It just goes to show how short-term these companies think and how locked into old ways they are.
I should say, to be fair, that Scott Adams has completely relaunched the Dilbert site, which now includes a long-term archive and the ability to embed comics in your site with a widget. It's actually pretty cool. I don't expect the movie studios to wake up anytime soon, though. These are the same idiots who hate Pixar because, even though every movie they make is insanely profitable, they don't pump out movies often enough.
I always figured the reason they created new domains for movies was because they should be easier to remember after seeing then a longer url with the studio's name included. Plus I suspect a lot of people would have no idea what studio is making a given upcoming movie - I knew the love guru was coming out, but had no idea what studio was behind, only that it was a mike meyers movie, and looked crappy :)
In my opinion you missed something.
What they should do is keep all of the seperate domains and then use ALL of them to point to the new movie with some slightly varied anchor text pointing to the new movie.
Why?
1. 500 links from 500 different domains is much more powerful than 500 links from the same domain or, much worse, their own domain.
2. While I don't believe in a 301 redirect penalty . . . I do believe that there is a penalty when your content doesn't exactly match what used to be in the index for that page. So, taking a page that has massive inbound links with all natural inbound link diversification and making any change to it at all (that the spiders can see) is less effective. Leave it alone. It is pure white virgin snow on the top of Mt. Everest. Plus you talk about a single page of content . . . but they have about a dozen pages of content on the original site why dummy it down to a single page?
3. The studios need to think ahead in this little game. They need to have a section already on the page of a new movie that's title "Other Movies You Might Enjoy" and they need to feed that section with automated links to other movies they want to promote. They need to be autogenerated. Why? The change frequency needs to stay consistant. It needs to look natural. They can't leave the page how it is for six months and then all of a sudden decide to put a Shrek 9 link on the page.
4. If they really want to get paranoid. They should host the sites in seperate IP blocks. They should purchase the domains in a non-uniform fashion. They should keep them off of the same G'Webmaster Tools account. Not share Analytics code. Don't templatize their sites. And use open source code to confuse the crap out of Google and avoid leaving a nice juicy footprint.
Thoughts??
Payne
The reality is that all of this matters very little, if at all, to a studio. They are in the business of making movies and either living or dying by the box office.
It's a very short term business that runs in two to three year cycles. They think and act on a project specific basis. Once one project is complete, they move on to the next.
Very transient = SEO is not on their radar.
Which is why they should hire you Sean to do all this 'silly stuff' for $50K a movie and wash their hands of it.
'Internet?? Oh yeah we have this guy in Texas takin' care of that stuff. We got him cheap . . . the whole internet for only $50K. He's gonna make sure we rank well for our movie title and then do some new-fangled thing with the site once we're done.'
;-)
Payne
They should farm it out for a nice fat commission, and let capitalism be the motivation for the SEO shop. Who wouldn't want that opportunity?
It looks like Sony Pictures goes both ways on this. If you look at the list of films listed on their home page under the headings "Coming Soon" and "In Theaters," you'll see that 3 of the 16 titles listed have URLs like https://www.sonypictures.com/movies/thegreenhornet/ whereas the rest are of the https://www.hancock-movie.com/ variety.
It may be that the subdirectory sites are created for films that don't yet have their own domain.
Warner Bros, on the other hand, has movie sites like https://thedarkknight.warnerbros.com/ and https://getsmartmovie.warnerbros.com/ but they've also got https://www.journeymovie.com/
I think the 301 redirect is a great idea. Even if they dont really need the extra links, it certainly can't hurt. And advertisements for other movies and merchandise would be much more natural on a subpage of the studios domain than on the movie's branded site. Personally, I would put it on the studio's site right off the bat, to let the backlinks help the domains overall authority and encourage people to engage with the other movies on the site.
It strikes me that the movie industry used to put more stock into the websites in general. For example, when Godzilla the movie came out in 1998, Sony owned Godzilla.com, which can't have been cheap. The site languished for a few years before being redirected to the Sony Pictures page in 2003 (404 btw), and now belongs to Atari to promote the video game. Its history is actually really interesting:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.godzilla.com
In my memory, it used to be common for a studio to host the movie site on MovieName.com. Now I see most movies have a derivative domain that was probably available, or its hosted on the studio's site - so at least in terms of domains the web promotion for a movie seems to be less important to the studios than before.
Being very familiar with movie sites I agree that a site being "new" is not an issue. Via marketing efforts and the hundreds of movie news sites out there covering films getting backlinks is not an issue.
Slightly OT: What options did you use to generate that backlink report? If one enters the URL into the form and hits the submit button, differernt results are returned than those from your link above.
Thanks,
Vic
The options that show 19,000 links are: Show Inlinks: From All Pages to: Entire Site
Oops, thanks for catching that. I altered the count in my post.
for the record, lameassjokemikemyersmakesinthemovie.com is available.
as to your comment about promoting new films, i think it's important to note that a dedicated domain means new link juice and it's not hard to change the content of a microsite to that end.
My vote is complete apathy on their part. They take the view of "Do we really need to rank for this?" and decide "not really".
The question is, are they right? Does it hurt them not moving their content onto subdirectories and 301ing the old sites, or is so much of their traffic just stuck around brand terms that they don't really lose out.
*would love to see their analytics*
How often actually those movie sites really rank #1 for the movie name, I wonder... I am under impression, they seldom do (of course I haven't done any research...).
Besides, why do they have dedicated websites at all if they don't care about Internet too much?
P.S. are you now experimenting if the URL ending in "-" will get indexed? ;)
Interesting article, I think your reasoning does make sense. Presently most of the movie's marketing and promotion is made through traditional media (Really, who nowadays read the newspaper section?), although I presume we will see a change when clients and agencies start moving a bigger part of their budget toward interactive Medias. In my opinion, marketing upcoming movies on Facebook is a can't-miss strategy.
Interesting post. Think you got it bang on.
Amazing post Rebecca. Best of SEOmoz this week IMHO.
Can somebody send a link to this post to [email protected]? Rebecca will get a pay raise if they become new client of SEOmoz.
Great idea!
Dude, I'd be happy to just receive DVD screeners of films before they come out!
I have just read that "Automotive brands like Mercedes and Land Rover plan to stop using dedicated campaign sites as budgets tighten and consumers tire of fragmented content." Interesting.
hello to everyone. Sorry for the delay on this post. However, 9 hours of difference plus while you guys work we sleep doesn't give me much opportunity to comment and contribute to all the topics. I'm always the last one to comment. However, as an outsider (to the U.S. market) there's a point that I've seen and has been missing from the whole discussion. Keyword INTERNATIONAL. The vast majority of movies which come from the U.S. come in the format "The Something", which in almost every other market does not get translated. The lauch other sites in all different languages promoting the same movie and creating the buzz. All that link juice flows directly into the Studios. So my 2 cents here are, multiple those 500 movies by X possible languages in the world where there would be a market for the movie "The Something". That's the power of the Studios. The internet marketing just comes as a result of the already great job on marketing the title. Or have you ever tried to find a movie with keywords?
Excellent commentary and a true sign that movie studios and their marketing are, for the most part broken with the exception of niche microsites like WhySoSerious.com and the like. I'll be using this as an example in the near future, so thanks for making me look smarter!
Cool. You posted. I'll read it all tonight. The moz seemed a bit slow the last couple of days.
Payne