Question about Webmaster Worlds Outbound Links

[joe1182]

I have been looking at some of Webmaster Worlds out bound links and I am curious. When looking at a link it will say for example - http://www.example.com but, in the actual address you will be going to is h**p://www.example1.com/ra.cgi?blabla&URL=http://www.example.com this takes you to http://www.example.com but, I am curious why the actual link is different. Also I substituted Webmasterworld with example1. Does this help your ranking in the search engines? How do you do something like this? This may be a really dumb question but, I had to ask any way. Thanks

[brakthepoet]

Webmasterworld redirects all outbound links for a number of reasons. Brett discusses few of them a bit is this older post, redirect.cgi is it really necessary? [webmasterworld.com]

I've read some posts in the Perl and PHP forums about redirecting outbound links, and there are probably more in some of the other forums. Pick your favorite scripting language, and there's likely a way to do a redirect.