Google counts redirected links
After I was registering for Google’s sitemaps program, I was surprised that I found indirect links to my pages in the external links index. As you know, the old “link:www….” syntax has been disabled by google (does not show all the database secrets anymore) cause of too much abuse by “who-knows-who’s”.
So, if you want to know, what sites are really linking in, you have to subscribe to the sitemaps program. I have lots of indirect links (links working with the http-redirect, for example for click-counters) to my open source projects in software catalogs. Never thought they would count anything. But surprise, they are in the google database.
Hot question: Do they count in PR calculation?
