When a link isn't a link...

Someone is trying to tell me that links in an article that go to a redirect page are still good links. (ie. refer.asp?url=hffp://mylink.com)

I don't see google picking up on that since the page it does to actually has disclaimer and another link to launch the actual link.

Anyone believe that they would be picked up?

They will get picked up by google for sure. It's a common way to link in order to track behavior/blanking referer and such.
The question is if it's Follow/Nofollow and Index/Noindex.

Here's an example:

My url is NOT in original site... except as a paramter to their launch page. That means the anchor text isn't pointing to my URL, but to theirs. Take the first one.


The anchor text is
my big fat link


The URL it points to is
http://www.skyrock.com/r?url=http://www.mylink.com/


So the page it's pointing to is http://www.skyrock.com/r


And, it's using a javascript onclick event as well ... something Google won't follow - or am I wrong?


AND... the link itself is NOFOLLOW... so Google NEVER seems that second page. It just sees the "internal link" of http://www.skyrock.com/r


So pretty much... it's worthless for SEO purposes. The links doesn't exist to Google and the anchor text isn't associated with the link at all.

Again... or am I mistaken?

It is pretty much worthless if it is NOFOLLOW. To add insult to injury, according to Matt Cutts, if you are too aggressive with NO FOLLOW link building, you might still get penalized.

That's about what I figured. Thanks for the confirmation.

Defiantly, no follow links add little to no value. It is good to through 1 or 2 in every several hundred links, just to keep things looking natural! Just like getting small viruses builds your immune system, well this builds your websites ability to withstand a penalty better.