Yes or No for Ampersand "&" in SEO URLs

[DROIDSTERS]

Hi Mozzers

I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs.

Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using).

I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution?

Thanks,

Chris Captivate

[Morningside]

Ampersand is used as a delimiter for an entity in standard HTML, so inserting it could lead to a validation error and failure to load the page.  If you absolutely must use it in your URL, use the code: & which won't mess anything up.  It's just text, so there's no reason for Google to penalize it.  Under the concept of topic modeling, Google will recognize & as "and" but usually doesn't pay attention to connectors like that, so it's a non issue.

[ChrisDyson]

Never...

As James correctly pointed out the & (or ampersand) is not a good idea. However his explanation is a little incorrect.

You see URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, therefore the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format.

When using unsafe ASCII characters you have to replace them with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits.

Therefore an "&" is %26 and not & which is the standard HTML character set.

Personally I would look at a way to exclude the & and just have /5-star-hotel-near-beach/ for example

[webg]

The & character is also used in Google Analytics parameters. I believe that if there were any problems they wouldn't use. I use this character only to inform the start and finish parameters.

A good example is the UTM parameters used by Google: http://www.domainname.com.br/?utm_source=yourdomain&utm_medium=algo&utm_campaign=yourcampaign&utm_content=something

If you need to include special characters as the information is interesting escape the text before sending to the server.

http://someserver.com/?param1=someinfo¶m2=another¶m3=some text using special characters such & % and more

The url can be correctly corrected using the javascript escape() function to convert special characters like:

var param3 = 'some text using special characters such & % and more';
escape(param3);

// will result some%20text%20using%20special%20characters%20such%20%26%20%25%20and%20more

So your URL will be:

http://someserver.com/?param1=someinfo¶m2=another¶m3=some text using special characters such %26 %25 and more

..And will be corrected.

[Morningside]

So basically what you're saying is that Web Design Group, which is a trusted resource on internet coding since 1999 is wrong.  Here's more detail about entities:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/

The ampersand is the first character in an entity.  Entities are well respected and widely used, at least as long as I've been coding web pages (since about 1997).

[ChrisDyson]

Yes James you're referencing HTML that's incorrect