[anonyfox]

How about just sniff the user-agent and deliver perfectly rendered views/fragments of your SPA through a serverside PhantomJS process to crawlers?

If you used backbone routing properly this shouldn't be a problem.

Or, use one of the "Full-Stack" Frameworks for Javascript which merge the client and the server almost completely. Derby.js comes to mind, maybe even meteor.

[edit]: you mentioned PhantomJS in your summary, didn't see it. But you don't mention why you didn't use it.

[mrjoelkemp]

You're right about not mentioning why I didn't use it. Thanks for bringing this up.

I had the rare opportunity to re-imagine the profile app in the context of another app that was being built from scratch and went with the server-rendered approach.

The phantomjs approach is totally valid. Thanks for reading!