mod_rewrite and search rankings

I am in the process of redesigning (graphically) a site that has every page in one folder, and I want to start the process of organizing the content into related directories.

So old site there is
mysite/product-some-word.html
mysite/product-some-things.html
mysite/info-other-words.html
mysite/info-some-things.html

And on my redesign i've done
mysite/product/some-word.html
mysite/product/some-things.html
mysite/info/other-words.html
mysite/info/some-things.html

I've also made rewrite rules to rewrite the old url to the new ones, eg
RewriteRule ^product-(.*).html$ product/$1.html
RewriteRule ^info-(.*).html$ info/$1.html

My question is, how will this impact my existing search rankings?
Search engine spiders will still be able to access mysite/product-some-word.html (and the semantic markup of the page has not changed), but interally the page will be linked as mysite/product/some-word.html

[seomike]

I see it everyday. Someone proposing a url structure in the forums and asking for advice on whether it'll get crawled or if there are any visual flaws. So let this be an end-all post on the subject.

Out of all the experimenting with urls, I've found that
.com/ to
.com/folder/file.htm
works the best at being crawled regulary and deeply. PERIOD.

I did a write up on this subject today. View Source >>