Re-Directs and Broken Link Rumours

[TexasJeff]

One thing that I find is consistent in this world we live both here in cyberspace and in the *shiver* real world outside our front doors, is rumour.

In a site we just launched we wanted to be able to track the click throughs businesses were getting through our site so as they could see the value per dollar, however, the only way we knew how to do this was to redirect through a landing page that would count the click through before throwing the clicker on to their destination.

I here from some it is ok and from some that SE's penalize sites for this behaviour.

I would love some more input on this and if it is a problem does anyone know of a different way to track number of clicks without using redirecting landing pages?


Second Rumour is broken links.

Lets cut to the chase and pose the question, do they or do they not hurt your sites ranking?

It is another concern of ours since people interested in joining a top ten list actually enter all of the information themselves and they are not perfect so they sometimes make mistakes.

We are developing a tool to disable these bad links since there is more here then just the problem with SE's but I am curious about this rumour as well.


Thanks,