Is "&" character in url allowed? What is the impact to url if it's illegal and is present. I'm looking for an answer from an SEO standpoint.
Example:
rootdomain.com/Black&Decker/products
Is "&" character in url allowed? What is the impact to url if it's illegal and is present. I'm looking for an answer from an SEO standpoint.
Example:
rootdomain.com/Black&Decker/products
It's permitted (amongst other places) as part of separating specified parameters in a GET e.g.
http://example.com/query?a=1&b=2
defines a=1
and b=2
.
Note that & is a reserved character under RFC3986. See this Wikipedia entry on percent encoding for more details.
Technically it is possible to have an &
in a folder/file name. However it's quite likely to break somewhere for someone so it's best to avoid it. You could use a +
character, the word "and" or just omit the join altogether (i.e. BlackDecker
or Black-Decker
).
From an SEO point of view, any of those would be fine since they contain the keywords, and search engines generally ignore symbol characters in searches.