Google Does Crawl & Index UTF-8 Encoded URLs

A Google Groups thread asks if Google can crawl and index UTF-8 encoded URLs. The quick answer is yes, Google can crawl and index these URLs.

Google's JohnMu provided a link to the Google search results as proof, showing Google indexed and displayed the results:

John explains that in some cases Google won't crawl them. He recommends "that you also use escaped URLs in your links, to make sure that your site is compatible with older browsers that don't understand straight UTF-8 URLs."

John added that he has seen issues with Google when "the URL uses non-ASCII characters but the server is expecting an encoding other than UTF-8."

There are plenty of URL encoding tools you can use to properly link to UTF-8 encoded URLs.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.