301 Redirect / cross-domain canonical to a URL w/ Ampersand

[Gatelist]

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!

[Gatelist]

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!

[Horizon]

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