Selina Ward

I begin with the observation that a URL is frequently the longest-lived piece of infrastructure a company owns, which is why the same link appears in a decade of documents and none of them can be changed. Cleanup means removing what a link accumulates: tracking parameters, fragments inherited from an analytics tool, and occasionally a whole second query string appended with a second question mark. Normalising is straightforward, and changing a URL that has been shared is not. The safe approach is to keep the original address answering, with a redirect to the cleaned one. Campaign parameters are the useful case. A consistent naming scheme means traffic can be attributed later, and it only works if the scheme is applied consistently from the first campaign. Retrofitting it means the older links cannot be interpreted. A campaign tag on a shared link leaks information to the destination and to anyone in between, which is worth knowing before one is attached to a document that gets forwarded. Redirect chains here have the same cause as elsewhere: a shortened link, a tagged link, and a link added to a dashboard that shortened it again. Each hop is a place the chain can break, and the analytics you are trying to gather is lost if the hop strips its parameters. Finally, the characters. A URL that will appear in print or in a slide needs encoding for a different context than one in a browser bar, and a link that works in a chat application can fail in email.