Is “&” character inside url segment allowed?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.