Can a URL contain a semicolon and still be valid?

The semi-colon is a legal URI character; it belongs to the sub-delimiter category: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

However, the specification states that whether the semi-colon is legitimate for a specific URI or not depends on the scheme or producer of that URI. So, if site using those links doesn't allow semi-colons, then they're not valid for that particular case.

A semicolon is reserved and should only for its special purpose (which depends on the scheme).

Section 2.2:

Many URL schemes reserve certain characters for a special meaning: their appearance in the scheme-specific part of the URL has a designated semantics. If the character corresponding to an octet is reserved in a scheme, the octet must be encoded. The characters ";", "/", "?", ":", "@", "=" and "&" are the characters which may be reserved for special meaning within a scheme. No other characters may be reserved within a scheme.

The W3C encourages CGI programs to accept ; as well as & in query strings (i.e. treat ?name=fred&age=50 and ?name=fred;age=50 the same way). This is supposed to be because & has to be encoded as & in HTML whereas ; doesn't.