Do any search engine [spiders] take issue with escaped special characters in a page's meta tags, or do they all generally interpret them correctly? I suppose a quintessential example would be:
& => &
+1
A:
No, search engines are quite good at understanding HTML-encoded characters like & and <. You can feel safe using these values as any spider worth its salt (in other words any spider that will potentially drive traffic to your site) will grab those characters just fine.
Andrew Hare
2009-05-19 13:39:42