Now that’s a great title. But the gist of the question revolves around links that I have seen on high PR websites that seem to be effectively passing pageRank. These links have a “nofollow” in the HREF section of the hyperlink but also call an onclick function that potentially creates a separate URL whereby Google could crawl the link without the “nofollow” directive.
As I stated a few posts back, Google makes duplicate content for me, Google is looking inside Javascript functions to determine if there are additional URLs and content that they could crawl and add to their index. Their goal, after all, is organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. But I wonder if their quest to crawl content previously obscured by Javascript has inadvertently provided a loop hole for people who buy and sell links.
I recently encountered a hyperlink that was composed like, a href=http://www.mywebsite.com rel=”nofollow” onclick=window.open(this.href);return false;>my keyword <. As you can see, the initial hyperlink has a nofollow attribute and Google would thereby cut off pageRank flow to the destination page. However, since Google crawls simple Javascript functions such as the window.open function, will the initial "nofollow" be added to the URL which is derived from the Javascript?
I think not. But I shall test. I recently did a little work to make my vet's site accessible and their pet grooming page has yet to be crawled by Google. (See that, I just added this nice little Javascript function to the “pet grooming” link). So this is my little test. I will be looking to see if Google picks up the new grooming page and whether the link to that page from this blog shows up in GWT. Here goes….
(update April 21) – Google immediately crawled this blog post and ranked the post in SERPs. However, it DID NOT follow the JS link to the Tucker Vet’s grooming page. It looks like links in JS that are tagged with rel=nofollow are correctly read and observed by Google!
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