Hey all! We just wanted to inform you that a fix went live at approximately 3pm UTC yesterday (21st Jan 2021) to prevent prerender URLs from being needlessly decoded.
Using a URL with parameters like this as an example: https://[url]/?brand=H%26M&size=S
- Without prerendering, the query string parameter encoding is preserved and we serve the correct page to your human traffic
- Before this update, with prerendering, the query string parameter encoding was decoded prematurely; crawlers would be served a URL of
http://[url]/?brand=H&M&size=S - After this update, without prerendering, crawlers will be served the correct URL,
https://[url]/?brand=H%26M&size=S
To reiterate, this only impacted URLs served to user agents recognised as crawlers/bots, such as twitterbot.
Big thanks to you, our Community, for bringing issues like this to our attention and please leave a comment below if you have any questions or queries about this update!