Removing the number of first page in Yii2 Pagination from the URL - .htaccess

Question

For SEO purposes I need to remove the first page number from the URL. i.e I have the following:
example.com/pages/view/1 and example.com/pages/view the two URLs points to the same contents of the view action. I want to make the pagination free from 1 in the URL. i.e first Page link and Page Number 1 should be linked to pages/view.
I tried to deal with the $pagination object like the following:
$pages = new Pagination(['totalCount' => $books['booksCount'], 'pageParam' => 'start', 'defaultPageSize' => 10,]);
$pagingLinks = $pages->getLinks();
$pagingLinks['first'] = '/';
$pages->links = $pagingLinks;
However, the last line causing error:
Setting read-only property: yii\data\Pagination::links
So I have a problem to modify the links property. Is there any other solution to get this task done?!

Answer 1

According to docs you should set yii\data\Pagination::forcePageParam to false by passing it in Pagination constructor
$pages = new Pagination([
'totalCount' => $books['booksCount'],
'pageParam' => 'start',
'defaultPageSize' => 10,
'forcePageParam' => false,
]);

Answer 2

The above answer may works for direct use of Pagination but remain an issue if it was used from another widget such as ListView.
I found the solution from a comment on an issue report on Yii2 repository on github
The solution is just define proper route in config/web.php. Suppose here we have a controller called Suras and we use the ListView widget on its action's view called view. So placing rule array with defaults has value 'page' => 1 will prevent adding the page parameter to the link's URL of the first page. Also notice the first rule 'view/<id:\d+>/1' => 'Error404', is placed in-order to prevent any access to the first page using page=1 parameter, for example, trying to access mysite.com/view/20/1 will invoke 404 error, because there is no controller called Error404.
'urlManager' => [
'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
'showScriptName' => false,
'rules' => [
'view/<id:\d+>/1' => 'Error404',
['pattern' => 'view/<id:\d+>/<page:\d+>', 'route' => 'suras/view', 'defaults' => ['page' => 1]],
'view/<id:\d+>/<page:\d+>' => 'suras/view',
'view/<id:\d+>' => 'suras/view',
],
],
],