Ampersand issue in w3c validator and search engine - php

Question

I'm using more than one ampersand in my url, see my link below
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
When i try to validate in w3c validator it showed hundreds of error because of this & (ampersand).
After that i read some post in here and i got the solution too.
Instead of using (&) If i use (&) w3c validates fine.
But the problem now is in search Engine. Instead of taking (&). it is taking like the below link
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
if you copy paste the above link in the address bar it will take you to the wrong page!. Please help how can i solve it.

Answer 1

There must be an error in your code but since we cannot see any of it I think the most important bit is to understand why the W3C validator complaints about raw &.
The HTML syntax contains two basic elements: tags (e.g. <strong>) and entities (e.g. €). Everything else is displayed as-is.
Browsers are expected to ignore errors.
When you type unknown or invalid tags, the browser will do its best to guess and fix it (you are probably aware of that already):
<p>Hello <i>world</b>!</p>
... will render as:
<p>Hello <i>world</i>!</p>
But the same happens when you type an unknown or invalid entity. In your example, there are two invalid entities:
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
^^^^ ^^^^^
However, it works because the browser is clever enough to figure out the real URL. Only the validator complaints because it is a tool specifically designed to find errors.
Now, imagine I want to use HTML to write an HTML tutorial and I want to explain the <strong> tag. If I just type <strong>example</strong>, the browser will display example. I need to encode the < symbol so it no longer has a special meaning:
<strong>example</strong>
Now the browser displays <strong>example</strong>, which is precisely the content I want to show.
The same happens with your URL. Since & is part of the entity syntax, when I want to insert a literal & I need to encode it as well:
Barnes & Noble
... will render as Barnes & Noble. Please note that this is only a syntactic trick to insert plain text into a HTML document. Your document shows Barnes & Noble. to all effects, no matter how you encode it. So when you replace & with & in your URL, you are not changing your URL, you are just encoding it.
If search engines are spidering the wrong URL, that means you have actually changed your URL rather than just encoding it, so the source code is:
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&amp;vid=3975&amp;auth=many
... and renders as:
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
This can happen, for instance, if you encode twice:
<?php
$url = 'http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many';
$url = htmlspecialchars($url);
$url = htmlspecialchars($url);
echo $url;
... or:
<?php
$url = 'http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many';
$url = htmlspecialchars($url); // Oops: URL is already encoded!
echo $url;

Answer 2

Seems that you made a typo error, it must be & not &ampamp;