tedster - 6:07 pm on Jun 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

who would put links in JavaScript for GoogleBot to find

As I see it, this is not a common problem for the SMB - but rather for an enterprise site with a large web infrastructure. Many of those have always ASSUMED that Google would find JavaScript links and didn't even notice when it wasn't happening. This is the kind of business that will 404 a page with a million natural backlinks when a new version of the product replaces the old successful one.

Some of these enterprise sites even create their main navigation with JavaScript generated menus that work differently for different areas of the site. This gives them much easier maintenance over a global website with widely distributed "ownership" for the various site segments.

Other enterprises may use very complex AJAX calls. I know of one site where thousands of "product support" videos all live at the same base URL. So by not handling JavaScript in depth, Google had to ignore a good chunk of excellent content.

Even further, not every business even thinks in terms of whether their pages can be crawled, especially business that predate the web. And those businesses still thrive without getting search traffic to all their pages, because they are well-branded establishments that have attracted a large and loyal market offline. Google would naturally prefer to access and index all that content whenever they can.