George Kao Courses

🎬 YouTube Mastery

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Can you change your YT handle or username?

1:55 Video (10 MB) HD Video (38 MB) Audio (2 MB)
And you change your YouTube handle or the username within the URL, or is that a bad idea? It's a tricky one because once you change it, you're whenever where wherever you have promoted your channel, those links will break, I believe. I actually, if someone can confirm for me, I don't know if they do a redirect. From the old URL to New York. I think they used to.
I don't know if they still do, so someone can confirm below. But what will not change? It will not break your YouTube links. Meaning, if you've shared links to your videos, those notice those links don't have your handle. Your your handle name within it's just a a code that's unique to each video.
That doesn't change. So changing your handle, it's not it's not terrible, it's not disastrous, it's just you gotta be aware of wherever you've shared your channel link, which is probably not that many places, and those people probably forgot about it. They're probably not gonna click on the old link. So the negative effect is probably not that great, to be honest. And the positive effect could be obviously, the long term benefit of having the right username.
But probably shouldn't change it that often. So I shouldn't change it that, you know, probably just change it once or twice because you know, people do see the name also, the part of the branding. They see the URL, and they might they might have bookmarked it. Right? That's that's a part of the problem as well.
So change it if you need to. Don't worry about, you know, don't change it if you need to. That's all I gotta say. So hope that helps. And then, of course, change change wherever you've mentioned your channel, URL, everywhere else, you gotta go back and look look for those.
Sometimes, by the way, you can Google your channel channel URL and find those old places where you've mentioned or a friend of where you've gets blogged or whatever had mentioned, those those links you can go back and follow-up on those.

Yes, change it here.

However, be sure to also update everywhere you've mentioned or linked to that YT URL. Maybe google your YT URL and see where it's been mentioned.

Last updated 23 Jan 2024.