External vs. internal rewrite - SEO question

[txag92]

Basically wondering if anyone knows whether an external rewrite as described below is any different (to a SE) than an internal rewrite?

I have a page.html:

www.mydomain.com/dir1/page.html

that I'm trying to redirect to

www.mydomian.com/categories.php?cat=7

I can do it with:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^dir1/page\.html$ http://www.mydomain.com/categories.php?cat=7 [R]

but I cannot rewrite it internally - what happens is all my relational links to images, etc. think they are now in /dir1/ so I don't get any images, etc.

Maybe I just missed something simple.

Any insight on the SEO topic or help on an internal rewrite is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ignacio

[Caterham]

take a look on viewtopic.php?p=3006

No, don't use an external redirection. you'll habe no seo effect. You'll need an internal rewrite.