I'm sure it's been discussed before, but I couldn't find the answer: there is a website of mine. Static, but relatively popular, with lots of links to individual pages (phototramp.com). Since it's difficult to maintain, I'm considering redoing it completely with the help of ZenPhoto/ZenPage.

My server (Yahoo! small business) doesn't even support .htaccess, but I would prefer not to change it.

What happens to the old links, the search engine robots, and the overall rankings if it's redone dynamically? Are any image metadata be reachable by search engines? If so, how to do it with grace...? Cheers.

By metadata I mostly meant caption and ALT tags. What do the search engines do with pages generated dynamically? Is there a way of creating search engine optimized site with ZenPhoto/ZenPage?

You will of course loose the urls you have now. Since you already tried the zenpage default theme you already know how the links will look in Zenphoto /Zenpage then if you don't have modrewrite (which in my opinion every server/webspace that calls itself "business" should have today...). There is no way to change that.

Since you don't have modrewrite you probably could setup php header() redirects from the old urls/folders to the new urls. But search engines like google are actually quite capable to follow dynamic links nowadays, too.

There is also a google sitemap plugin available. http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/06/zenphoto-plugins/#sitemap

Could you recommend a decent and long-living server/webspace, supporting all what ZenPhoto/ZenPage needs, with modrewrite on, that may be of use? Thanks.

You could create a sitemap of your current website using a tool like XENU, then bundle these into a custom .htaccess file redirecting them to the new pages inside ZenPhoto

@tomczak: I can't really recommend a host because I only knew local German ones (and not even all of them). Probably others will have recommendations.