[cd34]

It's an old technique. What you might lose out on is surfers with javascript turned off being tracked, but, it does work. Your surfer will still hit the destination, the link looks clean and like a hardlink so google should be happier.

Another tactic people use is to do the actual redirect from javascript anyhow and leave their link looking clean.

There is also the question of most redirect scripts that still hand out 302s which are temporary redirects and potentially scrape your tradesite.

There's a ton of potential drama when dealing with link trades whether internal or external. Eliminating one potential issue seems like a good thing.