If you want to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube, you can. For example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s
Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video. Linking to a particular minute and second can be really helpful — for example, that link takes you straight to where someone asks Eric Schmidt a question about Twitter. From there, you can listen to his answer, where he says (among other things):
“We’re in favor of all of these new communications mechanisms. …. I think the innovation is great …. Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to communicate, especially if you’re willing to do so publicly.”
Deep-linking to a specific part of a YouTube video is really easy, so I wanted give a short example to tell how to link to a certain minute and second of a video.
{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
Aleluia, our requests have been heard!
Thank you for the notice Matt.
What about embedded videos? Can we somehow specify the initialTime in the embedded video URL like we can with Google Video?
This feature was cut-and-pasted from Google Video… emphasis on cut
Great tip, thanks so much. Very handy in my line of work! I too would be interested to know if you can do this in an embedded video . . .
Matt, you Blog too much
In respect to your “Paid posts should not affect search engines” my question is, why do ANY posts (paid or not) affect Google SERPs?
I would like to think, Google gives NO credit to blogs, forums etc as these are largely open to abuse. I.e I COULD post my own site link of hundreds of Blogs and Forums a day.
@Matt
.
Old stuff, my Blogpost about this Parameter was from 30. Oct. 2008
http://noodlegei.blogspot.com/2008/10/teil-2-youtube-videos-ab-einem.html
@Manuel Lemos
For embedded Videos, look my Blogpost (in german, use the Google-Translator-Button):
http://noodlegei.blogspot.com/2008/10/youtube-videos-ab-einem-bestimmten.html
And look for other YouTube-Parameter (Label: YouTube)
Bye, bye from Germany
The video “Eric Schmidt at Morgan Stanley Technology Conference” runs 41 mins and 43 seconds
The first time I saw it, I thought it should be &t=31m08s instead of #t=31m08s. But then I realised that in plain html files we are used to use #fragment to point to a specific fragment of text. Very clever.
Thanks for the update Matt. This would really help/allow us to drive people directly to a Major points of a video.
Philipp Lenssen, I loved that feature on Google Video, so I love that they implemented it on YouTube.
Dave, there are a lot of good blogs out there that should have links that count. Ultimately the quality of the information and links help determine the measure of a site, not whether it uses any particular content management system.
I like it. Very subtle. It’s almost like a poor man’s DVD player.
Matt, so are you saying one COULD manipulate PR by posting their link to hundreds of Blogs and Forums each day?
Wouldn’t it level the palying field if NO Blog posts (except the Authors original post) count towards PR?
Thanks for the head up Matt. That is brilliant news. We do a huge amount of video and thats great news for our customers.
Matt Cutts: Great feature!
Dave (original): I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you actually mean that no URLs from blog COMMENTS should count – not that the actual blog posts shouldn’t count. At least that makes a lot more sense to me.
(Although I am aware that already most blog comments actually don’t affect Google SERPs because of nofollow..)
I bet that Google actually do have some spam filters that would pick up if you suddenly began to post hundreds of forum links and blogs posts with the same link..
it could have been even better, with a shorter URL (you know the user experience thing :p)
what if “#31m08s” works too ?
Also if you add &fmt=18 it will play in high quality (for vids that have HQ availible)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPxSanbWsEU&feature=channel&fmt=18
The above link is a trailer for a music video and we always want people to view it in high quality.
Hello Matt,
Thanks for this useful info.
Matt, I was wondering if you can take a look at my question in your “Paid Posts” related post.
The question is related to what Dave said here. I will be glad if you can just read my comment, this one.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/sponsored-conversations/#comment-263664
Thank You
Hope you will say something about it.
Regards
This is a really useful feature, though I can imagine it being really annoying for those who have slower connections. Linking to a part of the video 31 minutes into it may require some major buffering. It is interesting to see how it handles such things.
I wish Google can find a way to make the buffering of videos faster like how images are at times spliced up to load parts simultaneously to load faster. With the 9 minute maximum video length upload allowable on youtube, this feature does not really mean anything great, especially with more than half the videos there going for less than 2 minutes.
WOW!
that’s immense! I really liked this feature. From now own there is no need to watch the whole video cut or do annoying search, you can just mark it and share with some one.
cool news!
Now that’s a helpful little hint. Thanks!
Haha Thanks for the sharing this great tips! I didn’t even expect Youtube can do such an advance bookmark on specific video’s timeline! Cool! I will share this with my colleagues!
Now, we only have to wait until the google UX team finds a way to make evident that we can do this on the YT pages/player.
I already knew about it, but just the other day it took me like 2 minutes and a google search to remember how it was exactly done (my first thought was like “#t=30:08″ instead of “#t=30m08s”, and I’m sure there are quite a bunch of other variations [i.eg. like the one LebossTom suggested]). And yeah, 2 minutes is way too much friction for an ordinary user.
I really hope it’s not in the ouroboros state permanently (people don’t use it much because it’s not evident, and nobody at google feels like putting it in a more evident way because not much people are using it).
Matt are you saying that you can manipulate PR by linking on quality sites?
I feel bad for Matt when I read some of these questions in comments. He must have incredible patience.
He ignores the difficult ones
Or, answers them like a Politician 
Hi Matt,
I just came back to review my following comments but seems like my previous comment was removed and your comment Spam filter is undergoing some problems lol
Anyway, nice feature added to Google’s success to show specific part of a You Tube video
Best
and a cascade of one-upsmanship!! follows ..thanks for the tip
Hi Matt,
This save some of our time from not being wasted in seeing whole video.
If i have a video plays around 1 hr. I want to play only 5 min part of the video and the remaining should not be played when someone click the video link from my website i.e. can i mention start time and end time in the video link.
If i want 3 parts of the video should be played and I don’t want the other part to be played.
Can i make it if i would like to make 3 parts of the video should be played, can i make it using a single link?
Hello,
Excellent explanation of the duplicate content issue. Thank you.
In this connection I compiled this .htaccess script:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=”"
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
It redirects
domain.com
domain.com/
http://www.domain.com/
http://www.domain.com
domain.com/index.html
http://www.domain.com/index.html
to http_://domain.com/
Well, I’m not an Apache guru and I would like to comment this script against possible issues.
Best Regards!
This really helped, came across this site through someone else.
Thanks
Scott Dylan
Just spotted that it doesn’t work with a minute value of “00m” (though you can omit the minutes value completely or just use “0m” – might want to pass this on?
Strike that – stupid ad blocking rules.
This doesn’t seem to work anymore. The link example shown in this post starts playing video from the very beginning.
I still love this… after using it so often it still impresses me and all the people I send links to… but now wondering why I’ve not used it to save clips of the best bits to view on my phone…
Haha this is cool. Going to try now.
And hope Youtube becomes profitable soon.
I own 1 GOOG share!
Hey Thanks Matt. I am slowly but surely getting the hang of embedding Youtube videos for my hockey highlights website.
Okay, this is great. Now, how do you also encode a specific stopping point in the link — so your link starts and stops, just showing a specific clip from the movie?
Thank you!
Thanks! Is there any way to mark the ending of the video aswell? the beggining and the end?
Wow good stuff. I’m also looking forward for any way to mark the ending of the video aswell.