Are numbered entities understood by Google?

Question

currently, our site is in local codepage win-1250. We are not using UTF-8, as this would give us a big headache with migration and modification of all the scripts. For few pages, we want to take advantage of Ajax submision of forms, and its serialize function is pushing us to the solution to convert all non-ascii characters to numbered entities (simplified, we can make it work for example for czech characters (CP1250) without problem, but as our site uses russian, arabic, japanes and other letters, numbered entities are doing just great)

The site displays ok, but I wonder, does google and other search engine "understand" that this :

"Kdy & # 382;"

is actually this

"Když"

? If someone is searching for "kdyz" or "když", does he get the result from us too or not ?

Answer 1

Based on a search for "Kdy & # 382;" producing a result "How to say $ Klesa kdy ž in their joint advisory group in different ..." I would say that it does understand numbered entities.

You'd have to test further using more numbered entities, limiting the queries to your site only using query site:domain.com search syntax, to be absolutely certain it's working for you.