Tracking outbound links (in Google Analitics)

So you link to other sites and would like to know how many clicks those links get? An easy(ish) way i have started to use is to add an extension /outbound/ to my website and then make a page for each outbound link i want to track (that's the "hard" bit) the url now looks like http://www.mywebsite.com/outbound/yourwebsitename then on that page you add google analitics and a 301 forwarding javaScript that sends traffic to the target website. You will also want to add the address /outbound/ to your robots.txt disallow so it wont get indexed. Or add a no index rel tag to the link. Now in google analitics you can see how many page views http://www.mywebsite.com/outbound/yourwebsitename has and this will tell you how much traffic you have sent another site.

I wont lie this is pretty hacky, but it works well. The only implication is that the site you link to many not get the same amount of page rank because they did not get a straight link (but im not sure about this).

I think Facebook use this method (with nasty auto generated URLs) - well they gave me the idea anyway as facebook links seem to do this.