Tracking affiliate links via 301 redirect

Is there a better way?

[vivalasvegas]

I would like to track visitors that leave my website clicking an affiliate link. A simple way to do it is to link to inexistent pages and redirect these pages to the actual affiliate links:
redirect 301 /affiliate/page1.html [affiliatesiteexample.com...]

My questions to people more knowledgeable than me:
1) Is this a safe practice as far as search engines are concerned?
2) Is there a faster way to do a redirect (I mean there is a lag between the moment a redirected link is clicked and the moment when it actually starts opening the actual destination page)?
3) Is there a better way to track external traffic?

Thank you.

[vivalasvegas]

Maybe I'll get luckier this time..

[Receptional]

My questions to people more knowledgeable than me:
1) Is this a safe practice as far as search engines are concerned?

Make sure you robots.txt out the non-existent page. If possible. Also maybe nofollow the links to the non-existant page. You would be better if the non-existant page is not even indexed. Many affiliates use 302 in this case.

2) Is there a faster way to do a redirect (I mean there is a lag between the moment a redirected link is clicked and the moment when it actually starts opening the actual destination page)?

The lag with a 301 or 302 should not be an issue.

3) Is there a better way to track external traffic?

Two other ideas. 1 is to run a script, setting a conversion (goal) in your tracking system before redirecting (so then use meta or javascript redirect. This gives better tracking, but worse lag. OR... get the merchant to add your conversion tracking script on their thankyou page. Cool... but virtually impossible if you don't know the merchant personally.

Dixon.

[vivalasvegas]

Thanks very much Dixon.

[jdbnd]

If I understand what you're asking... I use Google Analytics, and I just add this sort of thing inside the <a> tag:

onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/articles_anaarticle1');"

You need to call the GA script at the top of the page, not the bottom, in order for this to work, but I don't think it introduces an unacceptable lag if you have a decent web host.

It then shows up in GA as a pageview of page "outgoing/articles/anaarticle1" or frankly whatever you want to make it. And you can set goals around that and track those as well.

You don't need to do any redirection whatsoever, to make this work although there may be other reasons to do that.

Joe