Sophomore Year: How to Link to Us

Questions Answered

• How do I link to a specific page on your site?
• Can I put one of your search forms on my site?

Class Summary

Linking to the Internet Movie Database is an easy way of adding value to your web pages. We offer various ways of doing this, each offering particular benefits depending on how you want to enhance your web page. We also offer advanced services to help you do this when you have many people or titles on one page that you want to link.

We welcome and encourage these links. Permission is not required to do this, but we do ask that you acknowledge the database using its correct name when you link to us.

Lessons

1. Linking to the IMDb home page
2. Linking directly to an IMDb title or person entry
3. Deep linking to specific information
4. A note about "old" URLs
5. Putting IMDb searches on your site
6. Automatic linking: the Link-it service
7. Embedding IMDb Flash Boxes

Extra Credit

• The IMDb Logo

Linking to the IMDb Home Page

Official Name:

The Internet Movie Database

 

Abbreviation:

IMDb

 

URLs:

http://www.imdb.com/

http://www.moviedatabase.com/

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Linking to a Title or Person Entry

To link to the main page of a person or title entry in our database you can just cut and paste the URL you see at the top of your browser when you look them up. (For bulk linking, consider the automatic Link-It service.)

An example might be: if you wanted to link to Mad Max, you could look it up and you'd see the URL was...

Note the final / at the end of the URL; if you leave it off we'll redirect browsers to the correct link, but this will introduce a delay in getting to the actual information.

Perhaps after linking to Mad Max, you wanted to link to Mel Gibson. Here's the URL:

IMPORTANT: When linking to the IMDb, we ask that you let your users know that the link leads to us. For example, if your page was about Tom Cruise, you might say "Find out more about Tom Cruise at the Internet Movie Database." If you're going to include a number of links to people and/or movies within the body of an article or text where noting us on every link is overkill, please add something like the following somewhere on the page:

Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.

Here is the HTML code for this attribution:

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Deep Linking to Specific Information

Another thing to note is that you don't just have to link to the main page of a movie or title. As you may have seen with our Page Flicker, we break up our data into separate categories, so if you're referring to a piece of trivia about say, North by Northwest, you can go to its trivia page and copy that URL from your browser to use instead...

North by Northwest main page link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/

North by Northwest trivia page link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/trivia

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A note about "old" URLs

IMDb URLs for people used to contain the text of their names (the same was also true for titles a long time ago), but we have moved to a scheme where the URLs for both people and movies contain a unique and permanent identifier. There are a number of reasons we did this:

1. Consistency: URLs for names and titles are now all exactly the same length and structure. This simplifies our website software, making us able to serve pages that are smaller and that load quicker. This is also the URL scheme we use on IMDbPro.com.
2. Permanency: People sometimes change their names due to marriage or other reasons. IMDb also does a considerable amount of name manipulation behind the scenes to assure authority and consistency. With the new scheme, the URL for a person will remain the same regardless of any changes to their name. The same is true for movies, which can change titles several times before release, or be known by different titles in different countries.
3. Portability: Most titles and names contain spaces; many also contain exotic letters -- all of which need special encoding to appear in URLs. Different browsers and email systems also handle the encodings differently, which has in the past led to broken links or mangled URLs. A good example of this is Hólmfríður Þórhallsdóttir, who appeared in the 1981 Icelandic film Óðal feðranna. URLs constructed from these kinds of names and titles often break when passed through different pieces of software. It's also much easier to verbally communicate our new URLs than our old ones.

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Adding an IMDb Search to Your Web Page(s)

If you want to offer your users quick access to our most popular information, we've made it easy for you to add an IMDb search to your web pages with a minimum of technical skill.

There are five searches available: Movies & People, Movie Quotes, Movie Showtimes (U.S. only), Movie Recommendations, and Celebrity Birthdays. The "fancy" implementations are shown below, but when you click on "Put it on your page", you'll find instructions for both "simple" and "fancy" options.

Movies & People Search
Enter the name of a movie, TV show, or person and then click "Go" to get more information about it/them from imdb.com.   Search provided by The Internet Movie Database. To put a search on your web site, click here.	Put it on your page
Movie Quotes Search
Enter part of a movie or TV quote and click "Go" to search the quotes at imdb.com.   Search provided by The Internet Movie Database. To put a search on your web site, click here.	Put it on your page
Movie Showtimes Search
Enter your U.S. zip code to get today's movie showtimes from imdb.com.   Search provided by The Internet Movie Database. To put a showtimes search on your web site, click here.	Put it on your page
Movie Recommendations Search
Enter the name of a movie you like and click "Go" to get recommendations of other movies you might like from imdb.com.   Search provided by The Internet Movie Database. To put a search on your web site, click here.	Put it on your page
Celebrity Birthdays Search
Select a day and click "Go" to get a list of celebrity birthdays from imdb.com.   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 January February March April May June July August September October November December Search provided by The Internet Movie Database. To put a search on your web site, click here.	Put it on your page

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The Link-It Service

Try mailing the above sample page to get a feel for how the link-it service operates.

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Embedding IMDb Flash Boxes

We have setup two flash boxes that you can embed directly in your web pages. They feature links to the top 10 movie trailers on IMDb. We offer the boxes in two different sizes, so you can use whichever size works best for your website. The HTML code for each box is listed below.

The Code

<!-- BEGIN 400x250 TOP-TEN TRAILERS BOX -->

<iframe src="http://i.imdb.com/hotlink/top10_trailers_400.html" width="400" height="250" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"></iframe>

<!-- END 400x250 TOP-TEN TRAILERS BOX -->



<!-- BEGIN 171x600 TOP-TEN TRAILERS BOX -->

<iframe src="http://i.imdb.com/hotlink/top10_trailers_171.html" width="171" height="600" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"></iframe>

<!-- END 400x250 TOP-TEN TRAILERS BOX -->

IMDb Logo

Here are two IMDb logos that you can use on your own web pages to signify a link to the Internet Movie Database. To download them, just right-click on the link in the lefthand box, select "save target as" and save the graphic to your hard drive for later use.

Static GIF 55x27 pixels, 2059 bytes
Animated GIF 59x40 pixels, 6848 bytes

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