Programmers: Counting outgoing link hits
 

I was wondering if anyone can give me info on how scripts are tracking outgoing hits and not using links like

http://www.yoursite.com/out.php?id=77
or
http://www.yoursite.com/out.php?site=goto.com

I'd like to be able to track what link was hit along with the ip address of the surfer.

Any help or providing links with info would be greatly appreciated :)

That's pretty much the only solid way to do it. You could always use mod_rewrite to clean up the links, so for example, you'd have:

http://www.domain.com/go/3425

Other way would be to add an onClick statement to your <a href> tags. For example:

<a href="http://www.somesite.com/" onclick="trackHit(34);">

Then have a Javascript function name trackHit() that sends a quick AJAX request to track the click.

Check out TALS
www.bigdotmedia.com/tals.php

I track the last IP that hit a link, if the person hitting the link matches that last IP it doesn't count it, if it's the same IP that clicked it last time it does nothing. It's an extremely simple method but my stats almost always mimic google analytics.