War on Urchin

The very long URLs created by Urchin and other web analytics was one of the problems that URL shorteners were created to solve.

Whether short URLs have a "malicious" effect is a topic for a different discussion, but whatever the effects of URL shortening, Urchin parameters are not among them.

Urchin parameters certainly do make it harder to detect duplicate URLs, which would be pinboard's primary problem with them. However, so lots of other URL parameters like sessions, landing page refs, etc.. Urchin's are just the most common ones.

[Disclosure: I work for awe.sm, which provides social media analytics using, amongst other methods, short URLs]

The utm parameters allow a site to track campaign information and replace much more annoying techniques like setting up unique landing pages or redirects. There's no relationship between these parameters, which have been around for nearly 10 years, and URL shorteners.

http://example.com/?utm_source=June%2B2011%2BNewsletter&...

Source: June 2011 Newsletter

Medium: Email

Campaign Name: Free Summer Tickets

The moment that you store that URL in other service, a number of those tags become incorrect anyway (it is not an email anymore), and the stats you will get from it will be tainted. Campaign tags are useful, but this approach by pinboard may end up in tracking being more accurate (certainly from in terms of tracking campaign media/terms/content), at the cost of removing the campaign name.

There is also little difference between this and a URL such as http://example.com/Free-Summer-Tickets/June-2011-Newsletter?... being set up to serve the original content other than at least with the campaign tags you've got a single canonical URL using the more correct query parameter mechanism.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2643515 The link contains this URL fragment: #.TfMwNJgETxs;hackernews

I think it's bad design to not assume that people can and will always share URLs with others. Putting tracking strings in URLs ignores this fact.

I often see Urchin URL parameters even on submissions on Hacker News. Most of the time they say utm_source=feedburner, which means that they were taken from an RSS reader. Just think about how easily such a submission reaching the top of Hacker News would distort the statistics.

Doesn't this make the the statistics almost worthless? Or at least harder to interpret? I think so.

There was a time where your site would be

site.com/product.php?id=x or

site.com/product.asp?id=x,

now it's:

site.com/keyword-keyword/keyword/keyword/product-name?urchin or google analytics crud

it seems like a better way of doing it would be to capture those tokens at an initial url, but then redirect the user to the proper, clean url without them. that way you get accurate stats for visitors-from-rss-feeds, but everyone else that clicks through as that clean url is passed along appears as a different source.

url cruft is much more an aesthic thing. see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/clean-up-extra-url-parameters-...

    if (window.history && history.replaceState && location.search.match(/utm_/)) {
    var check = setInterval(function () {
        if (document.cookie.indexOf("__utmz=")!==-1) {
            history.replaceState({}, "", location.pathname); //assuming you want no query string
            clearInterval(check);
        }
    }, 500);
    }

"erode user privacy" - The data gathered is aggregated and doesn't identify individuals.

"make it more difficult to identify duplicate content" - You're already stripping them because you don't like them, so just ignore them when de-duping. Again, you can't have it both ways.

"and benefit ad publishers at the expense of everyone else." - You're out to screw the guys who pay for all those wonderful free services you use, like GMail for example:

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