The Googlebot runs Javascript

I wish the AdSense bot would also render javascript before deciding what ads to deliver. Lots of my pages have very little static content and are rendered dynamically (think Twitter mashups). This causes AdSense to deliver completely irrelevant ads most of the time :(

I'm hearing from some SEO folks that since Google started running CSS and JS, standard DIVs that get shown as tooltips or accordions or sliders now count against your page quality because CSS and JS hide those divs until the user hovers over something or clicks something (which the Googlebot doesn't do).

They're saying these are counted as hidden text, and considered a spam technique. What I see people using them for is usability and self-discovery.

Anyone know any data on this?

it also fills out forms on your pages to see where they lead: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/crawling-...

That actually makes good sense. It would be an excellent spam page deterrent, since most cloakers are very handy in using javascript to diguise the destination of the page.

At some point the filtering must get so complex that simply running the javascript on the page and looking at the output is the simpler solution.

I'll buy this once cached results start showing text added to the DOM using javascript.

I suspect that the googlebot found a link containing a url to the resource in question, and crawled it.