How to Link to a Specific Point in a Youtube Video – Youtube Deep Linking

According to TechCrunch, YouTube is now allowing users to deep link directly to a given point in time within a video.  In order to enable deep linking to a given time frame within a youtube video, you need to merely append a tag to the end of the video URL string, namely “t=” and indicate where in the video to being playing using number of minutes and seconds.  For example, “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye9hUGRZZA0#t=0m57s“

It would be interesting to see how, if at all, this effects Googlebot’s way of counting links to a video or if it causes any difference in the thumbnail that is displayed in Google’s universal search results.  Anyone have thoughts here?

For those of you that are unaware, you can already specify a starting point for Youtube videos in the embed code if you want to have a video start at a specific starting point within the video.  In order to do that, you will need to utilize the start parameter whereby you will specify the starting point in seconds.  The video below was embedded using the following code:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Ye9hUGRZZA0&fs=1&start=59“</param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Ye9hUGRZZA0&fs=1&start=59” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

About the Author - Mark R Robertson
Mark Robertson is the Founder and Creator of ReelSEO.com. Mark has had extensive experience in online marketing, particularly in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Local Search, Video Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow Mark on Twitter @markrrobertson

View more articles from Mark R Robertson