How valuable or not is javascript linkback from a competitor?

[PaulGaileyAlburquerque]

A sector competitor has decided to link to me using the method[](javascript:OpenLink('http://www.example.com'))

[It's a contextually rich page and the link is in the body surrounded by relevant text although not so high in the code](javascript:OpenLink('http://www.example.com'))

[Moz Metrics of the page/domain linking to me are:

PA 30 mR 2.67 mT4.61
21 links from 9 root domains
Root Domain DA 88 DmR 6.77 DmT 6.68 2.6m links from 24k domains

Is the method of linking to me strictly from an SEO perspective:

A. Positive
B. Neutral
C. Negative

Thanks!](javascript:OpenLink('http://www.example.com'))

[Theo-NL]

B. Neutral

Pretty much the answer I've landed on by excluding the other two. Because this link is Javascript based and the engines are to my knowledge not following these kind of links (please correct me if I'm wrong), it won't give you any positive value. Giving that you're not doing anything illegal or bad, I don't see how this could affect your website's SEO negatively either. Thus, I would say that B best describes the value of this link from an SEO perspective.

[StalkerB]

Contrary to Theo I'd say: A. Positive

Pretty sure Google has been following js open links for many years now. I'd be reasonably confident of saying even if you did something tricky like href="javascript:CleverFunction('http://example.com')" and CleverFunction was designed to add nofollow/ open in new window, that Google would still be able to follow it from the url within the href.

You could quite easily set up a test for a page that only has a link like this pointing to it and see if it gets indexed.

The only thing I might not be totally sure of is if it passes juice, but I think as of mid 2009 it does (as I'm sure Google no longer endorsed js links as a method for preserving link juice).