PHP redirects are fine, as long they are 301 Permanent Redirects (not 302).
PR is passed through a 301 permanent redirect. PR is not “lost” with this type of redirect; it carries through to the final end page, wherever that may be.
People who use php redirects to count outbound links are not greedy or unethical, in my opinion. They are simply keeping track of the number of outbound clicks. However, many webmasters won’t trade links with a site that uses redirects on the links pages, because they don’t know exactly which type of redirect is being used — e.g. meta refresh, 301 permanent, 302, javascript redirect, etc. (PR is not passed through a javascript redirect, btw).
Sisko — your link on pokerlistings is not necessarily worthless. And no, you should not get rid of all your php redirects. It makes good sense to track your outbound clicks. This way, you can compare your stats to the stats of the affiliate program. If you see 100 clicks on your end, and the aff program says you only sent 12 clicks, then you know there’s a serious problem somewhere.
Mod rewrite shouldn’t pose any problems to the redirect either. In fact, using mod rewrite might be a good idea for sites with dynamic URLs. For some reason, Google doesn’t give visible PR to the dynamic URLs on my main site. Example of a dynamic URL:
[HTML]http://www.choicegambling.com/casinos.php?name=roxy-palace-casino[/HTML]
So, if you mod-rewrite the dynamic url into a static URL (i.e. one with that ends with .php, .asp, .html, etc., then the PR should show up in the toolbar after the next PR update.
The above example could be rewritten to appear like this, for example:
[html]http://www.choicegambling.com/casinos/roxy-palace-casino.html[/html]