Over at Digitalpoint I spotted a thread titled OnClick JS in the link ahref and I suggested a test. I mulled it over and decided to test it myself.
Hank has a new client who is wanting to count the number of clicks a link gets. In the past we’ve used redirects to count them but the Search Engines penalise you for using that technique. Hank’s client uses javascript to capture the click and an ordinary old href to do the rest.
If I have two links to page which shouldn’t normally get links. Will the way I link to them make any difference?
My targets…
I saw in my NBO NZ post that my link to a Domainz page caused that page to be indexed and to rank highly for the keywords nbo nz. I wanted to pick a page which wouldn’t normally be indexed and where I could be certain to be creating the only inbound link – and therefore responsible for any effect.
So, not wanting to throw things out for the actual businesses, I thought I’d pick some sites where the domain name is pretty unique.
- Regal Palms Motor Lodge in Rotorua, I’ve stayed there and it’s great.
- Simunovich Olive Estate – I don’t know anything about these guys but they have only one page of results in my test search so they seem a good target. They’ll get the bad link.
So here are my test links
I’ll keep an eye on these to see if the Domainz pages start getting indexed and if the links are seen to count. Watch this space…
The green lines are the tracked, experimental links. From what I can see both links took months to be added to the index and have both been added at the same time, and with similar (page 1) rankings. You’d have to assume, therefore, that the OnClick event doesn’t prevent Google from indexing the href portion of the link.
Simuolive nz test results
There’s been alot of interest in redirects versus onclicks so I thought I’d update the graphs to show how things stand after the big Google sort out.
This is the results for the clean, untampered link.
And this is the results for the altered link to see if having the onclick event impacts on the PR being passed.
[…] I’ve just had a dig through the archives and found the post back in October ‘04 that convinced me to drop the links with the redirect – more to stop the confusion than for any other reason – I guess I could have used the onclick technique. […]
Thanks your for the tests! save me hours of work and dayz to find out about this.