Google Can Now Crawl More JavaScript Links

Vanessa Fox recently published an excellent article, Google I/O: New Advances In The Searchability of JavaScript and Flash, But Is It Enough?

The article covers a lot of great topics, but one of the most interesting points to me was that Googlebot is now a lot better at crawling links in JavaScript.

The examples Vanessa lists of JavaScript that Googlebot can now execute are:

• <div onclick="document.location.href='http://foo.com/'">
• <tr onclick="myfunction('index.html')"><a href="#" onclick="myfunction()">new page</a>
• <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open ('welcome.html')">open new window</a>

She goes on to specifically state "These links pass both anchor text and PageRank."

It looks like I have some sites to update! These sites are using JavaScript links, and they could be subject to Google penalties for linking to bad neighborhoods!