Hello everyone. I have a couple questions about link tracking and whatnot within the search engines. At times, alot of sites use link trackers to track how many links a particular site may be getting or sending. These links will generally resemble something along the lines of go.php?link=324 Link 324 would then be found in the database, the number of views incremented and the user is redirected to the site. Now my question is, do the search engines count this as a inbound link to the other site or not? Does the link actually have to be a direct link ie http://www.mysite.com for it to count as inbound links for that particular site?
Before I answer, I am not sure, this is just a guess I'm going by. If the person linking from SiteA to SiteB made their PHP Script do a 301-Redirect to SiteB then I guess it would count? Otherwise if it was just sending a Header of the SiteB domain, it would not count as a backlink. Again, I may be completly off but that's what I'm thinking of when I see those types of links.
Yeah, that was sort of along the lines of what I was thinking too. As long as the 301 is intact in the header it *should* count. But who knows how the search engines alg's work. Anyone else have specifics?