title: Does the position of the canonical tag matters?
body: <p><strong>Background:</strong> I am working on a JSP web page and the project seems to be pretty fragile. The thing is that there are two tags for generating the canonical tag and I was wondering if this is a mistake of there is a reason behind this. They both are never generated on the same page so there is no competition posible</p>
  
  <p>Depending on the page, the canonical tag can be located at the Position 1 or at the position 2 on the next chunk of code.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;head&gt;
      &lt;meta charset="utf-8"&gt;
      &lt;meta name="viewport" ... &gt;
      &lt;link rel="alternate" ... /&gt;
      &lt;link rel='stylesheet' ... /&gt;
      &lt;link rel='canonical' ... /&gt;&lt;!-- Position 1 --&gt;
      &lt;link rel="icon"
      &lt;link rel="manifest" ... /&gt;
      &lt;meta name="custom-property"
      &lt;title&gt; My Page &lt;/title&gt;
      &lt;link rel='canonical' ... /&gt;&lt;!-- Position 2 --&gt;
      &lt;!-- Blah, blah, blah --&gt; 
  &lt;/head&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any chance that the canonical tag position could affect to the rest of the page?</p>