deadsea - 3:03 pm on Apr 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

tedster is wrong. My testing shows that Google currently ignores <a href="#" onclick="fn()"> links and <span onclick="fn()"> psuedo links. They DO NOT count towards the number of links in the page in the denominator of the percentage of pagerank passed to other links.

However, you have links embedded in the rel attribute. Google is certainly smart enough to find things that look like urls in javascript and follow them. I haven't tested urls in rel attributes, but it would not surprise me if Google can discover them as well. I have not tested whether Google drops pagerank on the floor for urls it discovers that are not in anchor hrefs. It is possible they drop pr on the floor for every url they discover, regardless of whether it is an anchor href link.

You currently can get link from your pages without dropping pr on the floor by employing techniques like you describe. I have used javascript to scramble the text in an onclick. Me tests shows that google did not pass pr across these and did not drop pr on the floor.

Google may however update their algorithms at any time. In addition, it looks spammy. You are trying to hide something from the algorithm. I'm not confident that such tricks would pass a manual review by a Google engineer.