I've seen a site linking to external sites like this :
<a href="http://www.example.com/layouts/lorem/linktrackinglayout.aspx?redirUrl=http://www.othersite.com" target="_blank">
<img style="float: left; margin-right: 15px;" src="/-/media/countries/uk/sjuasana.jpg?la=en-gb" alt="">
</a>
In the above example, www.example.com
is the name of the site the link is coming from, i.e. the above HTML was on a page on www.example.com
.
I guess they are doing this to be able to track outgoing clicks and were users are leaving their site from, but does linking this way remove any SEO benefit of the link? If they are crawled and indexed do they have the same weight as a normal link?