So... what is the truth about 302 redirects and where is someone with empirical evidence that proves that clean 302 redirects from one site to another does not carry link juice?
Recently, I've had overlay frantic people I link to wanting me to change my links to be direct rather than redirects. I have a high-traffic and well-indexed site (all pure white hat, not a drop of shady SEO). Every single outbound link on my site gets passed through a click tracker. The redirects are 302 and clean. I've had things set up this way for a decade without any issues. In fact if it weren't for my click tracking over the years, I wouldn't know which links my visitors like best (the same way, for example, Google determines Quality Score on AdWords) and wouldn't have been able to optimize my site to have quality links.
I do understand there is still residual fear from 2004/2005 when "Google Jacking" was discovered, but Google fixed that. I understand also that Google won't pass juice on same-site 302 redirects, which makes perfect sense since Google will NOT want to index essentially 2 pages which are intended to be the same resource. However, in the case of off-site links for which there is a non-existing redirect URL in-between, I fail to see what people are freaking out about nor do I believe (nor has it been proven) that Google does not pass link juice with such linking strategies. In fact it would be outright preposterous for Google to not treat off-site redirects where the URL doing the redirecting doesn't actually exist except to redirect as anything other than a 301 which has been proven to pass juice.
I understand that anyone on either side of the debate will have reasoning, claims, maybe even ambiguous references to quotes from people "in the know", but there has never been a drop of conclusive or empirical evidence. From my own research and observations, I've found that my linking methods are seen by Google as equivalent to direct links, to the point even where I'm nearly 100% certain link juice is also being passed. However, I don't have anything online I can point to to calm the people down who believe the opposite.
I would love to see proof, somewhere, by someone who's done scientific testing of this.
Also, in the meantime, what is a webmaster supposed to do to track outbound clicks while not causing irrational reasoning by people he links to? The only thing those people go by are their SEO experts who they pay, and of course a lot of SEO "experts" just parrot what they hear from others and depend on fear (rather than know-how) to sell their services.