Pagination – SEO on secondary pages

Thanks for the good words about MLA and for your question, which should be of interest to other users as well.

I am not by any means an SEO expert; my experience is limited and mostly theoretical. I do not have any facts regarding your question but I can share my preliminary thoughts. I would welcome any information you can share on how search engines actually work.

As you’ve observed, pagination controls will have links for “previous”, “next”, etc. that include a query parameter specifying the corresponding page that appears when the link is clicked. If a search engine follows the pagination link(s) by simulating a “click”, the secondary pages will be displayed and indexed. I do not know if this happens in practice.

The same logic would apply to other controls such as “term clouds”; if the engine follows each term link it would index the results.

You referenced “a post about rewriting url’s“. I did not have time to experiment with the solution provided by the author of that topic and so I cannot comment on its effects.

I am marking this topic “not a support question”, but I would be very interested in anything further you discover and share about the way search engines handle links such as pagination controls. I regret my own limited experience doesn’t provide a more specific answer. Thanks for your understanding and good luck with your application.

Hello David, thanks for your reply! I do understand how this is not a supported area.
I have been thinking about the best way for the end user to get back to a particular image – which is where pagination (as opposed to one long page of infinite scroll) would be better. Also, if you have one long page, say 100 photos, that would make the page load take too long and will also penalize your site in the search results.
This leaves pagination. I will need to do some testing, but since I am in local development I am not able to do this just yet. I will update when I know more – in the meantime, anyone else know if the images on paginated pages with the search query urls are being indexed? Thanks.