Backlink question

Will this count?

[Simsi]

Hi chaps

Hopefully a simple backlink question! I approached a client about using a review on their site, the idea being it would link to my site to serve the review, producing a backlink. Win win.

However, because I also present one of his key competitors, he doesn't want to send a visitor to my site, but has said that if i can serve it within his page or as an user-induced popup, with no links to my homepage, he'll do it.

Question is...how do i make that happen maintaining an Google backlink benefit? Javascript popups or <iframes> have sprung to mind but a) I'm not sure a javascript popup is googlised and b) an iframe has no anchor, even if it was to be counted as a backlink.

The only other idea I have is to brand the review per his website and serve it as a natural link, but he wasn't over-keen on this as he has a large but carefully planned dynamic navigation system which is fine-tuned and would be hard to implement, yet alone maintain, on my side. It is still a possibility (serving a "back to..." link) but if there is a better solution out there...!

Anyone have any suggestions as to a beneficial solution?

Cheers

Simsi

[tedster]

If it links to your domain, then it's a backlink. But if you can't link out of that target pop-up document to anywhere else on your site, then it doesn't do you much good -- the PR and link context won't "circulate" and Google has a habit of disregarding dead-end pages. I'm pretty sure this is what you were wrestling with.

Google does (finally) crawl the iframe src= attribute, but I can't see evidence that it gets the same handling as a link -- although to my thinking it should, because a link that targets the same iframe to change its document WOULD count.

[Simsi]

Thanks Tedster. Valid point about the link to the homepage, but I think I can convince him to let me do a link to the homepage as long as its well camouflaged.

Sounds like iframe isn't the best way then. Does Google crawl javascript links as in:

<a href="javascript:window.open('etc')">widget</a>

or is there a better way to do this?

[tedster]

Google now will try to crawl text strings in javascript that look like they may be a url, but it still doesn't "count" as a link, just a potential new url to crawl.

Here's the best of both worlds:
<a href="page.html" onclick="window.open('etc');return false;">widget</a>

The "return false" keeps the main window from reloading if the user agent has javascript enabled.

[Simsi]

Now that is a cool answer :) Thanks Tedster.