Linking to external URL with different domain from within an angularJS partial - angularjs

Question

All I am trying to do is include an anchor tag inside the html of a partial that links to an external site. Were this standard html, the code would simply be:
google
As simple as this is, I cannot seem to find a working solution for getting past angular intercepting the route (or perhaps replacing my anchor with the https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/directive/a directive unintentionally?).
I have scoured SO and the rest of the web and seen a myriad of solutions for dealing with: links within the same domain, routing within the SPA, routing within a page (ala $anchorScroll) but none of these are my issue exactly.
I suspect it may having something to do with using $sce but I am an Angular n00b and not really sure how to properly use that service. I tried the following in my view controller:
$scope.trustUrl = function(url) {
return $sce.trustAsResourceUrl(url);
}
with the corresponding:
<a ng-href="{{ trustUrl(item) }}">Click me!</a>
(as described here: Binding external URL in angularjs template)
but that did not seem to do the trick (I ended up with just href="{{" in the rendered page).
Using a plain vanilla anchor link like this:
google
also failed to do the trick (even though some online advised that standard href would cause a complete page reload in angular: AngularJS - How can I do a redirect with a full page load?).
I also tried adding the target=_self" attribute but that seemed to have no effect either.
Do I need to write a custom directive as described here?
Conditionally add target="_blank" to links with Angular JS
This all seems way too complicated for such a simple action and I feel like I am missing something obvious in my n00bishness, at least I hope so because this process is feeling very onerous just to link to another url.
Thanks in advance for any solutions, advice, refs or direction.

Answer 1

It turns out that I did in fact have all anchor links in the page bound to an event listener and being overridden. Since that code was fundamental to the way the page worked I did not want to mess with it. Instead I bypassed it by using ng-click to call the new url as follows:
HTML:
<a class="navLinkHcp" href="{{hcpurl}}" title="Habitat Conservation Plan" target="_blank" ng-click="linkModelFunc(hcpurl)">Habitat Conservation Plan</a>
Controller:
$scope.hcpurl = 'http://eahcp.org/index.php/about_eahcp/covered_species';
$scope.linkModelFunc = function (url){
console.log('link model function');
$window.open(url);
}
And voila! Good to go.
Thanks again to KevinB for cluing me in that this was probably the issue.