301 Redirect / cross-domain canonical to a URL w/ Ampersand
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I have a question regarding ampersands,
we are needing to redirect to a URL w/ an ampersand in the URL:
http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-&-Associates-Insurance-Agency
Will Google pass page authority/juice despite the fact that there is an ampersand in the URL, if we were to 301 redirect or cross-domain canonical to the url?
Should we 301 redirect to http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-%26-Associates-Insurance-Agency instead of http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-&-Associates-Insurance-Agency?
I don't have the option of removing the ampersand
Thank you for your time!
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Hi Matt,
Thanks so much for your answer. I also believe the best rule of thumb is"if the redirect works for a human, it will work for a bot."
Your answer helps greatly!
Thank you for your time!
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Hi,
I use VB redirects to URLs with ampersands regularly and cannot report anything but noticeable value being passed down in doing so.
I'm not a coding expert (so I would suggest that consult one in the first instance) but I would imagine it depends largely on the language you are writing the redirect in? For example, in PHP there are quite a few uses for the & character, so you may need to escape & with a preceding \ or by the use of $ - meaning to match the query exactly.
The best advice I can personally give from my experience is - if the redirect works for a human, it will work for a bot.
Hope that helps.
Matt
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