Weird href - is it still a follow link?

[BlueLinkERP]

On many publication sites I have noticed weird links like I have never seen before

<a <="" span="">href="http://test.com" onclick="linkClick(this.href)">Test</a>

Are these still follow links? Is the only thing that determines a no follow link "rel=nofollow"? So as long as the link doesn't have that, it's good to go?

Why might they have used a link like this? For tracking?

[irvingw]

It's an onclick event handler that redirects the URL when a user clicks on it but the search engine just follow the link regularly since javascript is not enabled. it is a dofollow link. PR sites use it often

[RBenedict]

Yes. It does not contain a nofollow-directive, so it'll work out.

The onclick-eventhandler is used for linktracking. Users who have javascript disabled and search engines get a "real" link, while users who have javascript enabled will run the linkClick-function (which will probably ping the server or run a script that will redirect to the url).