Google count every occurrance of a visitor counter as external link?

[cwizard]

I have a 158-page website with a ($58/yr.) visitor counter on every page. I'm minimizing unnecessary external/outgoing links to increase PR, and I'm wondering if Google counts every instance of my visitor counter as an outgoing/external link. Front Page 2000 (which I use to publish my site) gives a count of 137 External Hyperlinks in View > Reports > External Hyperlinks, but displays only 57 (the correct list of my external links) when I double-click "External Hyperlinks" in the Front Page 2000 Site Summary list. If my visitor counter were counted on every page, I should think it would show a total of 57 + 158 = 215 external links. (The HTML for my counter begins with Javascript referencing the URL for the counter company and my account within it, but the <a href> reference to my account is delimited by <noscript>s.)

[kaled]

<a href="some_url.html" rel="nofollow"> should prevent PR leakage if Google are to be believed.

Kaled.

[Ecaterina]

I am using rel="nofollow" too, but I have doubts google really respect this.

[steveb]

nofollow isn't an seo tool so it won't prevent PR "leakage", just the passing of it.

[texasville]

Would the counter still work if you moved it to an external file and referenced it from the body?

re:<SCRIPT language=javascript src="counter.js"
type=text/javascript>
</script>
If so, I doubt google will read the js file. And if it did..only once.

This would also save you load time cutting down on onpage code.

[Ecaterina]

ya, as texasville or:
do you really need that counter of your pages?
I have a site I need to display on the no. of visitors, (it's supported by a EU project). I've have a small js, it doesn't display the unique visitors, more exactly it displays the no. of immpressions on that page, anyway it's doing its job, since for traffic analyze I'm using webstats from hosting.
Do the same and don't loose PR.