Is it bad I have a cluster of canonical urls that 301 re-direct?

[lunavista-comm]

Just went through a migration. We have a group of canonical URLs that are NOT the preferred url, but  301 re-direct to the preferred URL.  Does this essentially "break even" and the incorrect canonical URL becomes obsolete? And/or would this be considered potentially bad and confusing for bots?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, it surely confused me Yes, it's confusing to bots and seems kinda shady to me. If it's possible, do it straight forward - canonicalize to prefrred url.

[Mobilio]

Messing with canonical is dangerous! This daisy chain in rel=canonical can quick eat your crawling budget and/or deindex important pages. You can see Glenn Gabe articles about them:
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/dangerous-rel-canonical-problems/
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/redirects-duplicate-content-seo/

In reality such incorrect canonicals confuses bot too much.

[lunavista-comm]

Hi Dmitrii,

Thank you! I totally agree. After writing this question out, I knew it would be just as confusing for bots. The request for change has been submitted to my team.