Link URL in OnClick

What "Link URL in OnClick" actually means

You have a clickable element that sends a user somewhere, but the destination URL is not in the anchor's href attribute. Instead it lives inside a JavaScript click handler. Classic shapes of this look like:

<a href="#" onclick="location.href='/pricing/'">Pricing</a>
<span onclick="window.open('/pricing/')">Pricing</span>
<div class="card" onclick="goTo('/pricing/')">Pricing</div>
<button onclick="navigate('/pricing/')">Pricing</button>

To a human with a mouse, all four behave the same: click, arrive at the pricing page. To a crawler reading the raw HTML, three of them are dead ends and the first one points at # (the current page). The real URL is trapped in script that the crawler may never execute the way a browser does.

Why this quietly wrecks crawling and link equity

Googlebot renders pages, so people assume onclick navigation "works for SEO." It sometimes does and often does not, and betting your internal linking on "sometimes" is a bad trade. Here is what is really going on:

• Discovery. Google's own documentation is explicit: it follows links only when they are <a> tags with an href attribute. A span or div with an onclick is not a link in their eyes, even after rendering. If a page is reachable only through onclick handlers, it may never be found.
• PageRank flow. Even when a URL gets crawled through some other path, a non-href "link" passes no internal link signal. Your money pages stop receiving the internal equity you think you are sending them.
• Rendering is not guaranteed or free. Rendering happens on a delay and on a budget. Relying on JavaScript execution to expose your navigation means slower discovery at best and missed pages at worst.
• Accessibility collapses too. A div onclick is not keyboard focusable, exposes no destination to screen readers, and breaks middle-click, open-in-new-tab, and "copy link address." This is the same root cause hurting both SEO and real users.

The spectrum: from invisible to fully crawlable

a href="#" onclick nav points nowhere

a href + onclick real URL, JS on top

plain a href real URL no JS needed

How to detect it

How to fix it, step by step

1. Find the destination. Read the onclick handler and pull out the actual URL it navigates to.
2. Put it in an anchor. Replace the element with <a href="/real-url/">Label</a>. If it was a div or span acting as a button, make it a genuine anchor.
3. Keep JavaScript only if it adds behavior. Analytics, SPA routing, or a modal are fine as an enhancement layered on top of a working href. The pattern is <a href="/pricing/" onclick="track(); return spaRoute(event)">, where the href is the source of truth and JS is optional polish.
4. Never use href="#" or href="javascript:void(0)" as the real link. Those tell the crawler the destination is the current page or nothing. Put the actual path in.
5. Re-crawl and confirm. Run Screaming Frog again with rendering off. Your previously hidden pages should now appear as normal internal links.

What "good" looks like

Open the page, disable JavaScript, and click your main navigation and internal links. If they still work, you are done. Every important destination resolves from a plain anchor in the raw HTML, JavaScript adds tracking or transitions without being load-bearing, and a rendering-off crawl surfaces the same link graph a rendering-on crawl does. When those three things are true, crawlers see what users see and your internal equity flows where you intend.

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