Hi guys, I really appreciate your responses... this is a good
discussion.

Let me explain a little more. I am an affiliate of a few merchants. I
want to keep a track of clicks that my visitors make to my merchants
site. This way I can compare visitor Click Through Rates to the actual
Conversion Rates.

I can set up server side redirects, but this is tiresome to manage with
my webhost as I have to log into my Control Panel every time and use
their GUI to do this...i.e. they won't allow me to modify the html
config file manually. Also, I want the page that is linked to to open
in a new browser, which a server side redirect won't do.

So, I use the http meta refresh like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.url.com" />

Then in my webstats it shows how many times these pages have been
viewed.

I changed some of these to php and use the header (location: URL)
command, but the files do not show up in my webstats, so I would prefer
to use html redirects but not if I am going to be penalised.

I will definitely do a search through Matt Cutts site for this and see
what he says about this. But do you guys think that meta refresh are
ok?

Pete.