The new Blogger redirects a lot of its links through another server. Ev explains why: it's to keep down comment-spam, to avoid apportioning unwarranted PageRank, and to protect Google's intranet.
Since blogger.com is linked from google.com, any sites we link to could pass on a fairly high PageRank value. (PageRank is one of the factors that determines what results show up in what order for searches.) In order to remove any possibility of unequal ranking of Blogger-powered blogs in the Google main search index, we send links through a URL from which Google knows to ignore PageRank. This way, Blogger blogs earn PageRank only on the basis of their content and other people linking to them, not because they're powered by a tool owned by Google.
(via EvHead)
