Google crawler doesn't read the meta charset attribute

I played around with HTML5 a while ago, and suddenly my page dropped of the google search result list (serp).

After a lot of investigating, it seems that the Google crawler/index doesn't care about the <meta charset="encoding"> tag.

My files were saved as UTF-8 and had a <meta charset="utf-8"> in them. But that didn't matter since my cheap shared webhosting server don't specify which encoding the files are in and the crawler therefor assumes ISO-8859-1.

The pages looked good in my browser, but not as nice on the SERP. After removing the meta-tag, I could replicate the issue in the browser. I also found out I could use Googles rich snippet test tool to test what happened after each change.

I tried som .htaccess fixed, but none worked as they filtered on a file extension basis. That means the fixes worked on http://www.domain.com/index.html, but not on http://www.domain.com/.

I had to resave the files as ISO-8859-1 and now it's all OK.