SEO Lessons From Watch-Movies.net

Watch-movies.net is without doubt the leader in online movies. The Alexa ranking for the site is in the top 300 and according to Compete, the site is getting around one million visitors per day. Why is the site doing so well? Because of good search optimisation.

In my opinion Watch-Movies.net is a very well optimised site, and whoever created it must be a genius. It is easy to see why the site dominates its niche so well, it is by no means a looker but it is incredibly easy to use.

The Rating System

One of the many things that sets it apart from the competition is the rating system in place. I am not too sure weather the site is using Drupal, Wordpress or something else, but it is fantastic. Users can view ratings for or rate any of the following:

• The movies
• The copies of the movies
• The comments on the movies (well, you can report them if they are bad anyway)

It sounds simple, but no other online movie site that I have seen offers ratings for all of these different things, I would imagine that they really do help the users a lot.

One Page For Each Movie

Another major thing that sets this site apart is the fact that there is only ever one page for a movie. Again this sounds simple, but if you look at all of the competition, many have multiple pages for each movie. Finding the right movie is often a nightmare. With Watch-Movies.net you have all of the copies for each movie on a single page, and then of course you have the ratings, so the users know which is going to be the best copy to visit.

Searching The Site

Searching for the movie you are looking for could not be simpler - if you know what you want type it into the search box and it will bring it up. If you do not know what you are looking for, you can browse movies by any of the following:

• Release date
• Movie type
• Best ratings in new release

Also, featured movies are shown throughout the site, and when you are browsing individual movie pages related movies are shown on the right hand side.

The User Comments

Finally the comments are managed incredibly well for a site of that size, there are no swear words and the users seem to be surprisingly friendly.

The site does do well on Google, if you search for watch before or after many of the movie titles you will see the site coming up. However a website of this quality deserves to be ranked far higher. If you search for a movie title on its own, the site will not usually make the top few pages. If I were Google, this is what I would have the top 5 looking like for movie titles. Like Michael Gray I believe that the official movie site should be ranked no.1.

• Official movie site
• IMDB listing
• Wikipedia I suppose
• Somewhere to buy it, Amazon or something
• Watch-movies.net page

Movie fans would probably never have to venture outside of the top 5 results. Instead you have review after review, with the odd place where you can buy it for more money than Amazon, or whatever whoever is at #4 is charging.

Never the less, the Watch-movies.net site is a brilliant piece of work and I would imagine that using the site is absolute bliss. I am sure that sooner or later the site will start getting the credit it deserves. I challenge anyone to find me a movie fan who wouldn’t want this site to come up in the top 5 - MPAA employees don’t count.

Watch-Movies.net includes everything you need for watching a movie, including different versions and copies, on one single dedicated page for that movie. And then of course you have user ratings, so you can instantly see weather or not the film is any good and which is going to be the best copy to visit.

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

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June 11th, 2008 3 Comments

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