Well the networks use 30x redirects for their links;
Google users 30x links for adware, adsense and natural search results when they are testing;
Yahoo uses 30x links for all out clicks from their search engine;
If you want to link to a 3rd party site, but need to do something first - like update a click count in your database, you either use 30x redirects, meta refreshes or javascript. Yes Google has a bug with 30x redirects, but that is their bug to sort and they still handle 30x redirects a lot better than they do meta refreshes.
From the W3 spec: -
Quote:
301 Moved Permanently
The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible.
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i.e If A links to B which 301's to C then it should be treated exactly as if A linked directly to C.
Quote:
302 Found
The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.
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This says you should continue to request B to see what url it redirects to as it might not always redirect to C. Which definately means that the url for B shouldn't be used as a replacement for C.
Either way a 301 or 302 is a pointer to a URL containg the data you are interested in, so the simple solution would be not to show them as results but to still follow links via them.
BTW if you are sending location: headers it's a 302 your sending not a 301.