Robert_Charlton - 1:51 am on Nov 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

HOME - MAIN PAGE1 - MAIN PAGE2 - MAIN PAGE3 - MAIN PAGE4 widgets - red widgets - white widgets - blue widgets - green widgets

Sounds like you're confusing breadcrumb links and pagination links just a little bit. Main categories really aren't numbered.

On WebmasterWorld, for instance, from the home page of this forum, this is the breadcrumb....

Home / Forums Index / Google / Google SEO News and Discussion

Once you're on the Google SEO News page, though, no one can predict what page you're going to go to next. The options to continue within the Google SEO News subcategory you're in are available to you via links elsewhere on the page.

But you are right... there is no global navigation to other sub-forums of /Google/ ...eg, to AdWords or to Google Finance... from the Google SEO News home page. For that you'd have to go back to the "Category: Google" page. This helps keep the navigation focused for the user and for Google. The purpose of the Google SEO News home page is to send visitors to one of the Google SEO threads here... not to send them to another sub-forum.

And here are pagination links from within a thread...

This 124 message thread spans 5 pages: 124 ( [1] 2 3 4 5 ) > >

In a thread or an article, the numbers do suggest a "next" page, because the posts of the thread have an order. But, once you're in a thread, as with the above example, you don't have direct navigation to all the other threads in the forum. You have to go back up to the Google SEO News home page. That keeps the user and Google from getting overwhelmed by too many choices.