Do we have any risk or penalty for double canonicals?
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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
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Yes! I read the example backward. I'm with you! All pages should point to C.
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Hi vtmoz.
I think Steve made a typo, saying to point all back to A.
My opinion here is:
- Avoid at any cost these canonical chains. They are messy to Google and it may get GoogleBot to reduce the importance of your pages.
- 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.
- Point page A to C and page B to C.
Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR. -
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-dressesto be the canonical URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content. Indicate this URL as canonical with these steps:-
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: -
If the canonical page has a mobile variant, add a
rel="alternate"link to it, pointing to the mobile version of the page: -
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]
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