Lord_Majestic - 12:41 am on Aug 14, 2008 (gmt 0)

It's very difficult to code SE algos to weed out hit counters?

No. But anything that popular would also get normal good backlinks - think Google search boxes with Google image in them, there are millions of the around and while those might be discounted there are still other good links to Google that more than make up for this discount.