Location.href vs href?

[gazzerman1]

I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question.

If I have an internal link in a div like

widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget

John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled.

Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as

widget

Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended?

Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this.

Thanks

[gazzerman1]

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