Movie theatre not listed in Google Showtimes - how? - Webmaster General forum at WebmasterWorld

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Movie theatre not listed in Google Showtimes - how?

Want to get our theatre's showtimes listed in Google

CharlieGeek

5:01 am on Jul 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

I manage the website for a small art house movie theatre. The theatre has had a website for more than ten years and has been listed in Google for all of that time, I think. We list the showtimes at the top of the page. But for some reason, we are not listed in Google Showtimes (when people search for movies) at all in our town. Most of the other art house theatres are listed; ours is one of the most well known and we aren't listed.

Any idea how to get listed? I can't imagine anyone else had to pay to do this, did they? (I have no idea how to contact Google - is it worth a generic email to them?)

bill

9:15 am on Jul 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

Do you provide an RSS or XML feed of your show times?

CharlieGeek

4:26 pm on Jul 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

No, but I see that several other local theatres that are listed by Google don't provide them, either.

Korrd

5:28 pm on Jul 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

Most online movie listing sites and large print media get their movie listings from Cinema-Source. Your theater needs to contact Cinema-Source and set up an account and then send in their schedule weekly. The last I know dealing with Cinema-Source was pretty low tech with account setup initiation done by phone and the weekly schedule update sent in by either fax or email. It's also important to get the new schedule in as soon as it is ready as even a delay to Tuesday or Wednesday can result in the dreaded "We have no information for this theater" appearing through the weekend.

CharlieGeek

8:51 pm on Jul 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thanks. But can anyone say for sure that Google uses this source? We are listed elsewhere already and if Google goes its own way on showtimes, I'd hate to start using this service and have it make no difference...

Korrd

5:59 pm on Jul 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

Your theater might already be in the Cinema-Source database. The two national aggregators of movie showtimes are Cinema-Source and Tribune Media Services. If your theater can be found in Yahoo's movie showtimes it's in Cinema-Source's database. If it can be found in Zap2it's it's in Tribune's.

My GUESS is Google uses Cinema-Source but with some sort of proprietary filtering. I just don't see Google expending the type of effort it would take to maintain their own database from scratch given the comprehensiveness of what is already available.

Can your theater be found by doing a search for movie theaters on Google Maps? Locally the theaters which are not included in Google's showtimes are also not found using Google Maps. But the sample is way to small to be conclusive.

Also Google doesn't show any theater for which it has no current data. Google's showtimes emphasis is on where and when the movies are, not what theaters are close-by.

If you're worried about cost using Cinema-Source and it turning out not to help with Google, Cinema-Source should be free to movie theaters to submit. It's the users of the database who pay. Also dealing with Cinema-Source should be a management responsibility, not the web person's.