Combining ClickThrough and SEO

Question

Has anyone perform a research on the effect of using redirects to SEO?

My situation:

I have a link, say <a href="click.htm?id=1"></a>, the target page will record a clickthrough through server-side code and send a redirect response for the original URL to the user agent. How does this may affect SEO?

In contrast, Google search result is using mousedown JS that calls the clickthrough address instead of redirection. So the original link is kept on the HTML.

On another web site, when a link is clicked an image is downloaded to record the clickthrough.

So the ultimate question is: how do you accurately record clickthroughs without affecting SEO (if it affect anything at all)?

Answer 1

Make a PHP file which records the click through to a database and then have it do a 301 redirect to your target URL, this will preserve link juice and act as a completely normal link without bloating your page with javascript or anything.

  header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
  header ('Location: http://targetlink.com');

Unless I misunderstood the question?