Do we have any risk or penalty for double canonicals?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have double canonicals. From page A to page B to Page C. Will this be Okay for Google? Or definitely we need to make it A to C and B to C?

Thanks

[slatronica]

Yes! I read the example backward. I'm with you! All pages should point to C.

[GastonRiera]

Hi vtmoz.

I think Steve made a typo, saying to point all back to A.

My opinion here is:

1. Avoid at any cost these canonical chains. They are messy to Google and it may get GoogleBot to reduce the importance of your pages.
2. There is no risk of any know penalty. Google probably will not tell you in Search Console that you have a penalty for several canonicals.
3. Point page A to C and page B to C.

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR.

[slatronica]

I'd have them all pointing back to C so it's a little easier to manage long term. G just updated some of their docs related to canonical URL use cases with some great examples. From this page:

You can use a tag in the page header to indicate when a page is a duplicate of another page.

Suppose you want https://example.com/dresses/green-dresses to be the canonical URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content. Indicate this URL as canonical with these steps:

1. Mark all duplicate pages with a rel="canonical" link element. Add a  element with the attribute rel="canonical" to the  section of duplicate pages, pointing to the canonical page, like this one:

2. If the canonical page has a mobile variant, add a rel="alternate" link to it, pointing to the mobile version of the page:

3. Add any hreflang or other redirects appropriate for the page.

They don't touch on the chain of canonical URLs you suggest but I'd have them all pointing to C since it's a scalable change.

[edit: updated to match example in OP]