MHes - 8:36 am on Feb 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

Not an issue that we have seen but I agree, better safe than sorry. A free counter could be a sign of 'low quality' but I doubt google looks at this. What they would be interested in is hidden links or the fact you have a link on every page to another site. This could have a negative effect on pr flow through your site and/or the fact you have links to a site on an unrelated theme. Overall it just does you no favours and could trigger a problem somewhere,,,better to be safe than sorry, as other members have said.

As an aside, some stat counters use a cookie. This can cause problems where someone visits your site using their company server which sees a third party cookie. I don't know the details but I think a few company servers are set up to prevent their employees visiting sites that have third party cookies for some sort of security reason. Not common but another potential problem.

.... and another problem is stats that use an image to count the visits. The counter won't work until the image has been loaded by the user. This makes it very unreliable and can cause page loading problems for the user.