Hi!

Here's one I don't know if it's getting the attention it deserves (yes, I know, spectacular grammar). Moved reviews are not showing up and are not being integrated at their new sites, including Shopping.com. This is a HUGE problem for movie reviewers as we've been told to move our reviews from "Movies In Theaters" to "Videos & DVDs" at the earliest possible point (because we've had DVD listings disappear after a time when no reviews are posted - and, as I've discovered with "Defiance," "Last Chance Harvey" and a few others, even after moved reviews are posted).

However, moved reviews are not being factored in to the star rating, the "this product has X ratings" and clickthrough traffic from moved reviews seems to be disproportionately lower. As well, moved reviews are not appearing on Shopping.com. This is funny, for me, as (for example) I have just broken into the top 1000 most popular movie reviews with a review of "The Tracey Fragments" and none of that popularity comes from hits from Shopping dot com because it isn't there.

This is a huge issue. Any idea what the state of integrating moved reviews is?

It would be nice if this one was fixed before the holidays so those of us with reviews in their proper place can enjoy the benefits of people buying DVDs through the site this year!

-W.L.

I never knew what the protocol for moving reviews from theatres into DVDs is supposed to be. I tried moving my reviews to the DVD section, but they dropped off in hits so I moved them back.

It would be nice if there was an established procedure for this, as movies don't stay in theatres for very long.

I hope you get an answer to your question regarding shopping.com, because it seems there are quite a few gray areas with regard to media reviews that need to be addressed.

There is no real protocol for moving reviews from a Movies in Theaters listing to a DVD listing. My philosophy has always been to place the review where you think it will get the most traffic. In general that seems to be an automatically created listing (as opposed to an SAP), preferably the one with the greatest number of other reviews.

We seem to do best when a movie has only one listing (the reason we haven't been adding DVD listings for films that have a MIT listing and vice versa)- it doesn't seem to matter much if it's MIT or DVD, though it's helpful if the search engine can find it and list it on the first page of results without a narrow-down.

Way back when, all the reviews were supposed to merge when the DVD listing arrived. That function has not worked in a long time (merging still happens, but not with any predictability whatsoever). When we end up with two listings, it splits the reviews and splits the traffic - which seems not to be very good for either listing.

So the real answer is, I guess, that each reviewer should do what they choose and what they think will draw the most traffic to their reviews. The only reason to move a review from one listing to another is if you think it will do better in its new home. Don't worry about losing products from the catalog - we're better off with a single listing anyway and products that go missing entirely can be added back in. That issue has lessened enough that SAP is a reasonable option.

I hope that all makes sense.

Sue