I have a site that has dynamically generated pages like example.com/index.php?page=home.

My first question is, do search engine bots know how to navigate this type of URL?

Secondly, if they don't, how can I make these URL's look like normal URL's without editing the .htaccess file? This is the big catch since my client is using Yahoo! hosting (which doesn't allow editing the .htaccess file), and doesn't want to switch to any other hosting alternative.

Any advice would be appreciated.
What I am doing with my website re-make is passing the URL-path on to php over a variable, so the url would look like example.com/home but the webserver (in my case nginx) redirects all requests to the same php script, i can call the path with $_GET['path'].
The nginx config looks like this to me:

Code:
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name sorunome.reubenquest.net;
    root /var/www/sorunome.de;
    fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
    rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?path=$uri&$args;
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass  localhost:9000;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME
                      $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include       fastcgi_params;
    }
}
Just keep in mind that you will have to also add that the php-script handles like images and such.

Also, search engines like google should be still able to look around your website even if you don't use pretty URLs, as they go by what kind of links are put on websites, pretty URLs just makes it a bit easier for them to index your website.
Unfortunately, such 'pretty' URLs usually require use of mod_rewrite or similar tricks so without access to the .htaccess file you may be out of luck.
As long as you expose the correct (ugly or otherwise) links on the site via the site's navigation menus and your XML sitemap search engines should have no problems indexing the site, however.
If you do ever make the 'pretty' URLs available make sure to 301 redirect from the old URLs as having two ways to get to the same content is detrimental to your search engine rankings.
OK, I do have all the links in the navbar and XML sitemap, so I guess I'm ok. Thanks Smile
Pretty URLs are actually a fun thing to play around with, as you can set parameters for your php script over the url path. That way you can make urls also much more easy readable for humans.
On my website-remake I used that to allow server-side resizing of images based on how the URL looks like, on omitting the file extentions for getting pages and on getting the pages at all out of a database.
Just some ideas what you could do Smile
  
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