Suppose I open up a web site and near the bottom there's a pager to navigate trough a list of items which is presorted and ordering cannot be changed. What approach do you think will be better ([this] is the current page):
[42] 41 40 39 ... 1
or
[1] 2 3 ... 42
I personally see this as follows: when paging "in reverse" (first variant) content of each page effectively remains the same all the time and once it's visited it will always be displayed as a visible link in a browser.
Latter, however, is much more widespread and therefore more familiar.
What are your opinions on these two options?
Answer
If you are going to use page numbers, then you should be displaying them in the order that users are expecting to see them; i.e. starting with 1. If you start with the last page number, all you are bound to do is confuse your users.
It doesn't really matter if the content on your specific "index" pages remain the same over time. For search engines, they should just be following the links on those pages (and not indexing the content) so it doesn't matter which page has which links as long as the links are there.
For users, it doesn't matter what page a link is on because people rarely (if ever) bookmark links to index pages, they bookmark the content pages themselves. Page numbers for pages like this are more of a mechanism for the user during their current session. It gives them a return point after reading an article, nothing more.
Also, if you provide the ability to sort content in multiple ways, the content on a given page will change anyways, so again, just having the paging start with 1 is going to make the most sense.
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