Concerning this, what about search engine links? If Google has already stored this link (and 1000s of others), won't the new linking structure break those links?
No, none of those links will break. You can actually try it yourself, just remove the page portion of the url. It will still go to the exact same post even now. The page portion is strictly used to track what postlist page you are currently on, nothing more. So instead of tracking it in the url, we just moved it to a session variable.
