tsnyderawt - 4:09 am on Sep 15, 2004 (gmt 0)

I understand that Meta Refreshes are treated as 302s which gives the originating URL credit for the destination's content.

This clearly is a bad thing if done maliciously.

But it seems the majority of occurances that I've seen and used it is for tracking click-thrus. Tracking has to be done on the host's website prior to sending the visitor to the destination URL.

For instance,
website abc.com links to xyx.com/index.htm

The only way to track click-thrus, is by linking through a tracking script, i.e:
abc.com/link.php?URL=xyx.com/index.htm

The visitor clicks on this link calling the link.php on my site, which increments the number of clicks to xyz.com.

In this legitimate application, if we do away with Refreshes, how can click-thrus be tracked?