[paulanthony]

Never seen this in use before - maybe im behind with the times, but this is a nice way to pass pagerank and still track link popularity.

<a id="2442" href="http://www.domain.com/" target="_BLANK">LINK</a>

<script type="text/javascript">var root = '';
	var a = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
	for(i=0; i<a.length; i++)if(a[i].id != '')
		a[i].onclick = count_link;
	function count_link(){
		i = new Image();
		i.src= root+'/cl.php?id='+this.id;
		return true;
	}
	</script>

[paulanthony]

If you give another page a vote - via a link then you pass some relevance to that website - helping them - if you use a redirect script - the search engines don't favour the link as much - cause you are linking to a script on your own site i.e. domain.com/redirect.aspx?id=1

As for the link popularity its basically just tracking popular links.