Ampersands and rel="canonical" tag

[marketingmagic]

Question for anyone that may know the answer or have thoughts on it.

We're running MS Commerce server and I'm getting our IT Team to implement the <link rel="canonical" href="" /> tag on products that are duplicated in multiple categories.

In doing so our system seems to be changing the "&" into the ampersand in the URLs holding the original content.

If you copy and paste the URL into a browser with the ampersand in it, it doesn't resolve.

I'm thinking that when google crawls these pages it won't know what page is the original because we're inserting this ampersand URL.

Just wondering if anyone might have any first hand experence with this, or has ideas, suggestions or thoughts on how Google would deal with this.

Thanks in advance.

MarketingMagic

[tedster]

If you copy and paste the URL into a browser with the ampersand in it, it doesn't resolve.

If it doesn't resolve for a browser, then it won't resolve for another user agent like googlebot either, right?

I'm not clear about what, exactly, your systems is doing to the ampersand, but it certainly sounds like you need to fix this.

[marketingmagic]

I've posted the same thing in Google Webmaster help and according to the folks there, the ampersand is the correct way of displaying the & symbol. They've said everything should be fine. We've made these changes live and are watching log files for bot errors.

[tedster]

We've been making some changes to he board software here so I'm not quite sure what your post intends to say. Are you talking about using the html entity (using spaces between characters) "& a m p ;" in the url versus using the ampersand character "&"?

[TheMadScientist]

If you're talking about using the HTML entity as tedster asked about, and I assume you are, since there's only a couple of ways to get an &, encoded is correct. Your browser will interpret it when it's in a link prior to attempting to open the URL, but if you copy and paste it in it won't work, because it's not decoded.

Run the page through the w3c Validator and if you don't get an error on the URLs they are correct.
You will get an error for & by itself (unencoded) in URL.