We sure saw a hell of a lot of improvement when we moved a lot of client-side rendering to the server. Before that, Google wasn't indexing any of our content that was rendered in JS.
We know googlebot executes JS. But this could be primarily for things like validating that a site isn't cheating by dynamically hiding search keywords and so on. It is also for generating the page preview.
It's good to see that they're starting to index JS-rendered content too, as seen with the Facebook comments widget, but it does not mean we're free to ignore these issues just yet. As it stands, client-side rendering in general means a huge hit to search ranking and experience (e.g. your search results won't have anything meaningful to say, and will probably use irrelevant text like your static footer/copyright notice as the description).
We know googlebot executes JS. But this could be primarily for things like validating that a site isn't cheating by dynamically hiding search keywords and so on. It is also for generating the page preview.
It's good to see that they're starting to index JS-rendered content too, as seen with the Facebook comments widget, but it does not mean we're free to ignore these issues just yet. As it stands, client-side rendering in general means a huge hit to search ranking and experience (e.g. your search results won't have anything meaningful to say, and will probably use irrelevant text like your static footer/copyright notice as the description).