Last Friday, I posted a fun topic at the SEW blog asking, Washington Post Selling Text Links? I followed up that post with a Search Engine Watch Forum thread named Do Washington Post Blogroll Links Pass Link Pop?
At first glance at the sponsored blogroll service provided by the Washington Post, you would believe that the links can and would be counted. Here is what they look like:
<p style="padding:0px; margin:0px 0px 2px 0px"><a href="http://www.VivaLasVegasBlog.com" target="_blank" onclick="sa_onclick( 'http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/tracking/textlink/blogroll/' );" style="color:#0C4790; font-size:11px">Las Vegas Travel</a></p>
Brian White comes in from Google and responds;
These links will not count for PageRank value. For instance, gadgets-weblog.com is not receiving PageRank from washingtonpost.com. Neither will the links count from washingtonpost.com to finance-weblog.com, for that matter.
Matt Cutts then backs up his team member with;
Yup, we certainly noticed these a while ago. dyn4mik3, it may look like a clean link, but the fact is that the onclick behavior invokes a new page and different behavior from a typical hyperlink, and that's visible to anyone viewing/analyzing the source code.
Hmmm. So any "onclick behavior" that invokes a new page, would not pass any PageRank? Has that always been the case? Of course, now Matt and Brian are being questioned in the thread. Not that they don't believe Google isn't counting the Washington Post links, but because they really want to know if these onclick JavaScripts would prevent PageRank passthrough or not.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
