An Extra Click?

I’ve seen some bad ideas in navigation, but this subtle one takes the cake (a nice German Chocolate cake).

Typically when you see navigation, you see a list of links. Click on the link, you go to the next page.

Wrong.

On this particular site (nameless), which was recently redesigned (and nicely by the way), someone came up with the idea of making the site visitor click a button after selecting a link to follow. Mind you, the tooltip tells them to click the button to continue.

Why? Was anyone thinking of user experience or search engine optimization? Hello?

By the way, each anchor link does not contain a href attribute with the URL to follow. It does contain unique IDs and rel values that obviously some script is using.

Sounds like some pet project for some developer.