Tracking v SEO benefits of link

to track... or not to track..... that is the question

[7_Driver]

My main site has widgets for sale. I also have a directory site that links to lots of widget-related resources.

At the moment, I link the directory to the main site - and track the effectiveness of the links like this:

mainsite.com/red-widgets.asp?referrer=1234 with an anchor text of "Red Widgets".

That gets me great tracking - but it's occurred to me that I'm not getting the link popularity benefit for the red-widgets.asp page - OR the benefit of any anchor text, since the search engines will think that

red-widgets.asp?referrer=1234

is a completely separate page to

red-widgets.asp

So it seems like a choice between getting the full benefit of incoming links, or tracking them - you can't have both.

Has anyone come up with a solution to this - seemingly intractable problem...

[volatilegx]

Maybe a JavaScript OnClick operator would solve it. Link to the domain you're sending traffic to, but have the OnClick operator handle the logging.