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.
