[jlangevin]

I'm sorry, but again you're thinking about rewrites the wrong way. the way mod_rewrite is working here, is aliasing a url over a real location. it's not redirecting, at all

a redirect, to a search engine, is when the search engine visits product.php?whatever and gets sent to product.html

a rewrite is when the SE sees product.html, but what happens *behind the scenes* is product.php?whatever is being displayed

the search engine has NO CLUE that this is happening. this is not a redirect. this is not malicious, and you will *not* get penalized for using mod_rewrite in this fashion (unless you resorted to some black hat SEO usage of mod_rewrite, which is not happening in this case)

cheers.