I have a customer who wants to track the performance of a link on one of my sites. They planned to use the simple site.com/?track method. I have two questions that I hope someone with more experience than I (that opens the field plenty big) could address. 1. While traffic from links is certainly a bonus I thought the real purpose of links was the search engine benefits. Am I wrong or confused? 2. How would a tracking url impact the performance of the link? I would think it would negate any search engine benefits or at least hurt them but there's lots I don't know.
Use a 301 redirect to forward your tracking script (landing page) to the base domain name so it counts as a link as well, after saving the hit to a file/ database.