Linking method causing Google penalty?

[Nostalgic Dave]

I have two websites, both currently in penalty and I have been struggling to find out why.

When someone does a search of my database, at the top I have a link that says "not finding what you are looking for? try eBay!". This link is not a direct eBay affiliate link however. I have my ASP program doing a "response.redirect" to the real affiliate URL. I did it that way mainly for tracking. Is Google seeing this as possible spam or cloaking or something? Any advice is appreciated, as always.

Thanks!

[Decius]

You won't get penalized for outgoing links. And you won't get penalized for even using outgoing redirects.

The fear of being penalized is mainly if you are masking duplicate content using redirects or bad linking.

What you are mentioning is only relevent if you want to know how the PR of the target page is being affected, which I'm assuming you don't care about since you're just logging clicks using it.