Youtube Embed Tip – Remove Embedded Player Search

As you know, many video content producers are utilizing free hosting platforms and video sharing websites like Youtube to power online video on their own websites.  There are clearly many benefits to utilizing these services, primarily the fact that video hosting is free and reliable.

Today, I was reading the Wellcomemat blog and found an interesting post from our friend Christian Sterner, Co-Founder of Wellcomemat, a powerful solution for online real estate video. Christian mentions Youtube’s recent added video search functionality that appears within the default embeded YouTube player.

For those of you that are unaware, Youtube recently released a new feature that places a Youtube search box within the embedded player.  When a user rolls over the player, the search box will appear prominently in the header as shown to the right.  Additionally, it appears at the end of the video replay screen.

What is nice about the feature is that when a user finds a video in the search, it will be played inside the player, directly on the page.  However, for businesses leveraging video for purposes of marketing products and services on their own website, this can lead to some negative consequences with regard to control.

I agree completely with Christian about the importance of control for local video marketing content.  What’s more is that there are plenty of other available services out there that are inexpensive to provide video content hosting for your website – Ooyala, Blip Pro, open-source players, and many more…  Youtube is not a bad solution either, if you spend the time to learn to use it the way you want.

Here is the Good News

Rather than go into all the problems that the new Youtube feature may cause (users never watch your video, find competitor’s videos, traffic metrics for length of visit become misleading, etc…) I thought it would be useful to post a small tip. So here it is:

You can remove the search bar from appearing in the your embedded video.  Yes you can.

Simply add &showsearch=0 to the end of each embed.

For example:

Regular Youtube Embed Code:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/jMa0esP4sBA&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/jMa0esP4sBA&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Modified Youtube Embed Code:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/jMa0esP4sBA&hl=en&fs=1&showsearch=0 “></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/jMa0esP4sBA&hl=en&fs=1&showsearch=0 ” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Here is an example of the embedded player without Youtube search:

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

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