i recently went through the work to create a sitemap for google submission, putting only the main and important URLs in the list for the time being eventually i will have completed the entire thing. but we are still getting these errors where the URL breaks on a & and sends the search engine to a search page rather then the page that contains the Heading that the URLs point to. ie: http://www.yellowpagecity.com/US/NY/Rochester/Abattoirs/Daisy+Estate+&+Household+Sales/ instead of going to the page that contains the information and heading for "Daisy Estate & Household Sales" the URL breaks and sends the user or the search engine to a blank search page that is only searching for the words "Daisy Estate" not the rest of the Heading. now when the URL is created dynamically it is encoded as %26 and when i created the sitemap i also encoded them as %26, so i dont know why google is changing it back when the googlebot comes through. can anyone help with this issue?
You might have some external links pointing to that webpage with &. Is are your %26 page being indexed at all?
thats something that we are looking at already to figure out if that is causing the problem, but we thought the the sitemap submission would help sort out some issues it only created more. in the google master tools i get the "WARNINGS" thing next to the certain sitemap that contains anything with a &. but my sitemaps like i said were coded with a %26 not a straight & so i dont see where the issue is coming from. as for them being indexed there cant be any way that they are because the URL breaks and sends the bot to a search page looking for just the first half of the URL not the entire thing
In that case those might be old warnings. Wait for a week or so before those warnings go from your dashboard. It's good that you have changed your sitemap. Webmaster tools interface might just be lagging behind.
thought about that as well, problem is that up until friday last week we didnt have a sitemap submitted because no one had ever taken the time to go through and create one. so these warnings as of friday night (10 hours after submission) werent there, i got to work this morning and i had warnings on 90% of the sitemaps that were submitted.