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Yes it should follow through the link with exception of no-follow tags and robots.txt etc.

OK, so as I expected there would be nobody able to answer this question So I asked John Mueller at Google! I got a very precise answer. widget A div with an onclick is nofollow. so this would be a bad idea if you want internal pagerank to flow. Currently the only way to make your clickable areas functional and Google friendly is this way below: widget

We were hit with an unnatural links penalty on 23rd of July 2012. (full story here) The effects of the Penguin algorithm lead to the unnatural links penalty. Google claims to ignore all bad links but when you reach a certain point they want to make you aware of it and accountable. That's when you get the manual penalty. Without a warning there are tons of websites out there who are about to trigger a manual penalty because the website owners have no clue about this stuff. The disavow file can be used to protect you from the penguin algorithm triggering a manual penalty. The fact your site can also be affected by the links with no warning is so counter productive to good search results. If Google says they ignore them already then your site should simply lose the benefit of those links not also receive negative effects as a result. I am going to reconfirm this point with John at the next hangout.

Thanks Anthony, I have heard this recently. My problem is I want to find a solution and repeat it 20,000 times LOL.

Hi Gary, To answer each of your questions: 1. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. There are a few factors that Google will take into account when it sees 301 redirects to a new domain. In the past, this technique has been used to manipulate Google, for example people would buy expiring domains that have links pointing to them, then 301 that domain to their own - even if the domain was in no way related to what the expired domain was about. So Google will look at the relevancy of the links and try to figure out if the redirects would make a good user experience for anyone who clicks on the links and gets redirected. 2. Yes. Google needs to crawl the links in order to find the redirect and see where it points to. Depending on how strong your website is in terms of link equity, it may take a few hours to a few weeks for Google to crawl all of the pages on your site and find the redirects. Because of this, redirecting one site to another can often lead to at least a temporary loss in traffic for the domain whilst Google figures out what is going on. I hope that helps! Paddy

We were hit by Panda and Penguin and got an unnatural link penalty way back in 2012, Staff at Google confirmed there was no issue, however I have confirmation that we have STILL not recovered from a penguin refresh yet! Even after all this time. However as of yesterday my pagerank is back on all my sub pages! Maybe this is the first sign of an actual recovery. Even though the pagrank back in the day was a steady 6 with the odd occasion of a 7.