A lot of sites, most notably search engines like Google, like to rewrite all the links on their pages. So search for this page and instead of http://ideas.4brad.com, the link Google gives you is http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=short-string&url=http%3A%2F%2Fideas.4brad.com%2F&ei=med-string&usg=huge-string&bvm=short-string or similar. (I have redacted the actual codes.)

What's happening is that when you click on the link, you really go to Google. Google records what you clicked on and other parameters related to the search so they can study just how people use their search engine, what they click on and when. It's a reasonable thing for them to want to study, though a potential privacy invasion.

Because each click goes through Google, your clicks are slowed down. Because Google has such huge resources, and is almost never down, you usually don't notice it, though even with Google you will see the delay on slow links, like mobile GPRS and Edge connections. It also means you can't easily cut and paste links from search results.

Other sites are not as good. They sometimes noticeably slow own your click. Worse, they sometimes break it. For example, on my phone, when I click on links in LinkedIn messages, as well as Facebook ones, which are also redirected, it doesn't work if I'm not currently logged in to those sites. Due to some bad code, it also wants to send the link to the mobile apps of these sites, which is not what I want. (The one for LinkedIn is particularly broken, as it doesn't seem to know where the app is, and sends me to the Play store to install it even though it is already installed.)

In other words, these links break the web from time to time. They can also interfere with spiders. On the plus side, they can be set to protect your privacy by hiding data in the REFERER field from the target web site. For sites that have been identified ad malicious, they can provide a warning.

To fix this, sites can change all their links to be javascript. The link can be a real target, and associated onClick javascript can also send a web hit back to the server with the logging info.

A better solution would be to push use of the "ping" attribute in the HTML spec, and allow links to have both an href to the target, and another URL which gets invoked when the link is clicked. In the background, this would not slow down your click, or break it. Browsers could also elect to block it, which the sites might not like but is good for users. Links to malicious sites could be treated differently if that's part of the service. There would also be no need to fake the status window when moving the mouse over the link, as must be done with redirects.

Let's say no to all these redirects.