I'm working on a large site with thousands of pages and trying to implement link sculpting. For pages I want to rank, I'm using standard <a href> tags to pass PageRank. For pages I want users to access but not have Google index or follow, I'm using JS-based obfuscation: click event listeners on custom attributes with base64-encoded URLs.

My concern is whether Googlebot's WRS actually decodes base64 strings or simulates clicks to discover these URLs. And more broadly — is this a valid sculpting strategy, or am I better off with rel="nofollow" + noindex meta tags on those pages?

Any real-world experience or data on this would be appreciated.