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An SEO named Brock Ellison asked Google's John Mueller and Gary Illyes (he also asked others) the same question and he got different answers from John and Gary. The question is kind of one of those eye-rolling SEO questions "does Google see "and" and "&" the same?"
Gary's answer was fairly straight forward, where he said "in general yes." I assume the "general" part is the cases where sometimes where it doesn't mean and, but means something related to programming.
@BrockEllison In general yes
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) April 4, 2017
John Mueller was more abstract with his answer, saying "I suspect we don't have that hard-coded, but our systems can learn that fairly quickly." I guess Google's systems learn to know what the & means on the page and interprets it as such:
@BrockEllison I suspect we don't have that hard-coded, but our systems can learn that fairly quickly.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) April 5, 2017
Anyway, interesting to see two different responses to the same question from Google.
