Ask.com has announced this week that they are going to support the new canonical URL meta tag. Thus, Ask has become the fourth search engine that intends to support this new meta tag, after similar announcements earlier this month from Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.
However, even though each search engine gives detailed explanations as to their support of the canonical URL tag, a lot of questions still remain. The recent Yahoo update still produced some canonical issues, as reported by Webmasterworld forum members.
Not sure whether to use it or not? Jaimie Sirovich provides some tips on when NOT to use the canonical URL meta tag. I would only add to his tips that I’d wait before fully relying on it as nobody can be sure how long it would take all the search engines to fully implement the support of this tag (BTW have you noticed that Ask’s blog still has a link to Threadwatch?)
Update: forgot to include it yesterday but here’s a bit more on canonical URL meta tags from Matt Cutts.