Hello

I am developing charity site that promotes other charities! I need to track the exit traffic i.e. how many people went to http://www.madd.org from my site (we measure our success by how many people we send away!). Now the only way I can think of tracking all out going traffic is to redirect the traffic through a custom web page that logs all the outgoing traffic. My question is how much of an impact will it have on my ranking if I don’t link directly to the charity sites? Is there anyway around this? One solution I suppose is to use cloaking but I would like to avoid that if can. Thanks in advance for your advice.

you need a CGI script that counts all people clicking on a link leading to the charity site.

Correct ?

you're ranking is based on sites that link to you, not sites you link to.

if ranking is affected by sites that you link to, it's a very small factor.

sites that link to you impact on your ranking, site you link to do not (as far as i'm aware). so you'll be fine with a php / cgi script that tracks clicks out - it won't affect where you are in the SE's

You can add you links into your Sig.