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ChrisDyson

Yes James you're referencing HTML that's incorrect

ChrisDyson

Never...

As James correctly pointed out the & (or ampersand) is not a good idea. However his explanation is a little incorrect.

You see URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, therefore the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format.

When using unsafe ASCII characters you have to replace them with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits.

Therefore an "&" is %26 and not & which is the standard HTML character set.

Personally I would look at a way to exclude the & and just have /5-star-hotel-near-beach/ for example

ChrisDyson

How long does it take to get links indexed?

It depends upon on how often Google crawls the website and web pages concerned and whether or not they determine the content worthwhile adding to their index. You can perform a search in Google to see if the web pages containing your links have been indexed and check the last cache date.

**How long does it take Google Webmaster tools on average to detect links to my website? **

About 6 weeks on average, however Google does not include all your links in WMT

What about OSE?

The way Mozscape crawls and indexes the web means that deep pages are often not added to their OSE reports. If the links were only placed in the last 3-4 weeks it's unlikely Moz will havew found them all yet so I would hold on a couple more weeks.

ChrisDyson

Scott,

just because a link is not indexed by Google does not mean they don't know that your link exists. I would definitely remove these directory links from your link profile and if you are unsuccessful contacting the webmasters make sure you keep the emails and notes in your spreadsheet.

I have found its good to have this data in a Google Docs Sheet as it makes it easier to share with the Google Spam team once you do submit your reconsideration request

Cheers

Chris