You can bind a click handler that returns false:

$('.my-link').click(function () {return false;});

To re-enable it again, unbind the handler:

$('.my-link').unbind('click');

Note that disabled doesn't work because it is designed for form inputs only.

jQuery has anticipated this already, providing a shortcut as of jQuery 1.4.3:

$('.my-link').bind('click', false);

And to unbind / re-enable:

$('.my-link').unbind('click', false);

I know it's an old question but it seems unsolved still. Follows my solution...

Simply add this global handler:

$('a').click(function()
{
     return ($(this).attr('disabled')) ? false : true;
});

Here's a quick demo: http://jsbin.com/akihik/3

you can even add a bit of css to give a different style to all the links with the disabled attribute.

e.g

a[disabled]
{
    color: grey; 
}

Anyway it seems that the disabled attribute is not valid for a tags. If you prefer to follow the w3c specs you can easily adopt an html5 compliant data-disabled attribute. In this case you have to modify the previous snippet and use $(this).data('disabled').

Removing the href attribute definitely seems to the way to go. If for some reason you need it later, I would just store it in another attribute, e.g.

$(".my-link").each(function() {
    $(this).attr("data-oldhref", $(this).attr("href"));
    $(this).removeAttr("href");
});

This is the only way to do it that will make the link appear disabled as well without writing custom CSS. Just binding a click handler to false will make the link appear like a normal link, but nothing will happen when clicking on it, which may be confusing to users. If you are going to go the click handler route, I would at least also .addClass("link-disabled") and write some CSS that makes links with that class appear like normal text.