Embedding a youtube video on your website can be a great way to share content in the video form without having to worry about your site consuming a lot of your server resources while they are being played. The website plays right on your video as it its being hosted right there but in the background the you utilize the ginormous server strength of Google’s youtube to do the heavy lifting. Win Win situation for the website for owner right ? Not quite so
When a embed video is played on a 3rd party website through an iframe or an embed code, it is subjected to what Google calls related video suggestions norms. Whenever a embed youtube video is paused or when it ends playing you would notice that Youtube would automatically suggest you a bunch of what it thinks are related videos to the video you just played.
The problem with this arrangement is, Youtube ends up suggesting videos of your competitors which it thinks are relevant to the content of what your video was about. This beats the entire purpose of having a video embed, as you want your customer to enjoy your content and not hop on to one of your competitors which Google thinks has a relevant content.
How can you remove video suggestions ?
While Youtube doesn’t give direct options in video embed tools to disable the display of relevant video suggestions, you can bypass it by applying ?rel=0 at the end of your youtube url in the embed link.
eg. this is your embed code
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/K8YrX15e31s?si=9ZOktYKac_BLxLxT” title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” allowfullscreen></iframe>
you can modify this code to include ?rel=0 at the end of the youtube url and make it like this
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/K8YrX15e31s?si=9ZOktYKac_BLxLxT?rel=0” title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” allowfullscreen></iframe>
This communicates to the display parameters on youtube that there are no related videos of this videos on anyother channel but its own and hence when the video is played or paused, the list of suggested videos that appear would be from the same channel and not from someone else posting content on the same subject.
Here is a youtube video from capture video and marketing explaining this process in detail:
