There are two answers here. If your page is a content page, you should follow the pattern that YUI's MVC uses, which is to hydrate your model objects by scrapi

There are two answers here. If your page is a content page, you should follow the pattern that YUI's MVC uses, which is to hydrate your model objects by scraping the html on the page. So you need templates shared (or similar) on back-end and front-end, you render them on the back-end with initial content, when dom ready happens you create models instances with the data that you grep out of that markup, and then as soon as the user does something you re-render that data with the client-side templates. Needless to say, this is less than fun. (Especially if you do i18n and need templates that can do so on both front- and back-end.) The second answer is: web apps usually aren't for searchable content. Let's say you're a startup with information about local restaurants, and you add a Backbone app for finding things nearby and filtering by type. Google should crawl your external site (home page, marketing pages, etc.) as well as your data pages (one page per restaurant, one per type per city, etc.). And all those pages link to or include your shiny new restaurant-finder Backbone app/widget. But Google doesn't need to crawl that app. For most users of Backbone, where their app sits behind a login wall anyway, worrying about search engines is irrelevant.