LBi Search: Ask.com also supporting the new canonical tag

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Ask.com also supporting the new canonical tag

Posted on 24th February 2009 at 11:25 am by Ian Macfarlane

Number four search engine Ask has joined the other three major search engines in supporting the new "canonical tag" - this is great news for webmasters as they can now use this new search technology on all of the "Big Four" search engines.

Number four search engine Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, have announced that they will be joining Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in supporting the new canonical tag, a recent joint effort by the search engines to combat duplicate content. This is fantastic news for webmasters as it means that they can use the same technology on their website and it will work on all of the “Big Four” search engines.

Ask is the fourth biggest search engine, and the smallest of the “Big Four” (AOL is powered by Google so is not included as a search engine in its own right). Ask has a market share in the United States of between 3% and 4% according to web metrics companies Hitwise and comScore, and its UK market share is also around the 3% mark. Although this is fairly small it is still a reasonably significant number of users and they are not that far behind number three Microsoft in these markets.

Supporting shared standards is particularly important for a small player in the search engine marketplace as it essentially drives down the cost of doing business. Relatively few webmasters will implement solutions specific to small search engines, preferring to concentrate on the dominant market leader, Google. However, webmasters will be more than happy to implement solutions which also work across all search engines, as it allows them to support all of the smaller players in one fell swoop without having to create tailored solutions for each one.

Although Ask were a few days later than the other search engines with their announcement, this is much faster than many of their previous reactions to new Search standards. Ask.com added support for XML Sitemaps almost 2 years after Google and months after Yahoo! and Microsoft, and still haven’t announced support for the “nofollow” attribute for links (although Ask.com claim that their algorithm is less sensitive to link-based spam as it measures local popularity rather than using global popularity like PageRank).

Hopefully this marks a change in pace for Ask.com's support of new standards in Search.

UPDATE - According to Microsoft Live Search, Ask.com were included in discussing the creation of this tag.

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Ask.com also supporting the new canonical tag

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