Did IMDB just screw over smaller movie blogs?

I know, I know….”Again???” you ask? Well, this time your traffic is probably affected, so listen up. Like many bloggers, one of the things I do when I finish a review is add it to the External Reviews section of IMDB. Long ago, this was located on the left side column, but it got moved to the bottom of the page like a year or two ago during one of IMDB’s regular awful redesigns. That layout was awful because not only was the External Reviews link moved below, but most of the other links were as well. So finally, IMDB made a change, and moved all the links to the right column as Quick Links. And this is what it looks like:

Notice anything missing? That’s right, the External Reviews! Where are they? Well, you have to click that section marked Explore More. Then scroll down. And down. And down.

There it is! Yes, the External Reviews are behind an extra click! And a scroll way down. Combine that with the unfamiliar layout and this spells less visits to your site from IMDB click-throughs. Now, I get maybe 1% of my traffic from IMDB, and that percentage has dropped by 2/3rds at least in the past week since this change has been implemented. I don’t even want to think about what it has done to smaller blogs that get a lot of their traffic via IMDB referrals. Of course, it all makes sense to the IMDB, promoting their own User Reviews over things that will make you leave the site. Too bad 99% of those user reviews are terrible! I can’t even begin to count the number of cool sites I found only due to the External Reviews (and conversely, the number of awful awful movie blogs!), and it is the place I go to find out what people thought of random movie from years ago. I hope this doesn’t discourage people from still posting their own reviews to the IMDB External Review section, because you never now whn they will redesign the site all over again.