I have 2 links on my page

link1 - displays an video player overlay when clicked but for SEO support Search engines would follow the link to a video detail page (video1.htm).

<a href="video1.htm" onclick="watchVideo(1);return false;">watch video</a>

link 2 - redirects the browser to the home page

<a href="home.htm">return home</a>

I'm attaching a click event for tracking to every link

$(document).on("click", "a", track);

in the track() function I'm making an asynchronous request to an image for tracking

I want to wait for the tracking request to finish before following the link.

I do not want to follow the link for the video player since the watchVideo() function opens a layover to show the video.

how can I wait for the tracking to finish before allowing the link to navigate or play the overlay.

I've seen code that does an event.preventDefault() then do a window.location=link.href. this does not work in the case of the video overlay since I don't want to navigate to the link.