There was a discussion last week over at Search Engine Watch regarding the links at the Washington Post and whether they pass PageRank or not. Matt Cutts and Brian White from Google both posted that these links wouldn’t pass PageRank because of the “onclick” behavior in the JavaScript.

I got curious, so I went through all the test domains and looked for a pattern, and sure enough, JavaScript onclicks do not pass PageRank, or the PageRank they do pass is so small that it is not seen. It was verified that Google does follow the links and index the pages. However, from a pure PageRank perspective, no “juice” is being passed.

So, be careful when using the onclick on your own sites.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 5:47 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.