What counts as a backlink?

[cdkrg]

I'm trying to control my pagerank drain and I am making offsite links like this:

<a href="#" onclick="Go('http://www.otherwebsite.com')">DESCRIPTION</a>

My question is whether search engines would consider that a link to the linked site. I am trying to prevent one site from losing any pagerank to the sites that are linked to in that way.

Will my method work?

BTW, there is a script in the page header that completes the redirect.

[Marketing Guy]

I would guess that if google can follow the link, then there will be PR transfered to the page.

But seriously, I wouldnt worry about it.

PR isn't that relevant anymore, and would be more relvant is the incoming PR, and not the outgoing loss.

(I would argue that PR hasn't been relevant for a long time, but Im sure that would just start a lengthy PR relevance debate! ;))

Scott

[isorg]

The thing about cloaking the outgoing link is that noone would want to exchange links with you, if they were aware that your link would not help their PR. The only ones who would fall for it is webmasters who weren't savvy enough to notice what you were doing... but then, would their pages have enough PR for their link to you to matter...?

[cdkrg]

I'm not doing this for exchanged links. See, this is for a forum and many spammers try to post linsk just to get a backlink. What I am trying to do is make all links that are user submitted use this tactic.

This is not for cheating a webmaster out of a link exchange (the site I plan to use this for does not exchange links).

In any case I'm not here to discuss the whole PR issue. I just want to know if the link counts in the site's backlinks. I have a few fancier tricks I could use that I know would work but want to know if they are needed.