Hide Links From Google Via Javascript

We have some links we want to hide from Google, using Javascript to 'hide' the link but let it work for the real clients. I was told from the SEO agency that the best method is to

Solution 1:

This is what I ended up with:

Links look like:

<a href="#" onclick="linkAction(this); return false;"data-href="uggc://fgntvat.....">

Where data-href is Rot13 encoded and linkAction does:

functionlinkAction(e) {
    window.location = rot13($(e).data('href'));
}

..in an external JS file.

I think this is the best obfuscation without performance overhead. Let's see what the SEO agency says :-)

P.S Rot13 taken from: Where is my one-line implementation of rot13 in JavaScript going wrong?

Solution 2:

The thread is a bit abandoned, and the circumstances are a bit other too. The code cited at the beginning seems to be from the agency i was working for.

After becoming known the googlebot is a kind of Chrome and posts like this, there are not many approaches remaining to hide links from googlebot.

One approach seems to me to be promising - maybe, if somebody would find it promising too, it would be coded:

• Step 1: publish a non-existing image
• Step 2: write a javascript function, which finds links with special certain class="hidden" and redesigns urls in the href-attribute using a regex. With redesign i mean something like: replace . and/or / with |, % or *, or divide url in some parts with non-url characters, like | or *.
• Step 3: write a second javascript function, which redesigns urls back to real urls,
• Step 4: place both javascripts into external file and close it against crawling with X-Robots-Tag
• Step 5: fire onError for non-existing image at least 6 seconds after onLoad (to be sure, that Googlebot goes away)
• Step 6: trigger through onError the second javascript, which makes urls urls again

The approach could be maybe reverted, like: url redesign could be triggered immediately through onError, and Back-Redesign could be triggered through onClick.