Is it OK to 301 redirect 1000s of duplicate random URLs to homepag?

[advertisingcloud]

Hello,

We found a critical error in our site internal link structure and the way Google indexes it. Website has 1000s of URLs that are basically 50% match to homepage. They all start the same example.com/category/random/random

I can do a redirect match and 301 them to homepage. This way 1000s of bogus url are not indexed and no value given. Is it OK to redirect so many URLs to homepage?

Platform is creating these URLs because of search query, where it adds all site content to one page. Currently this search page /category / has own canonical and all those duplicate content URLs have canonical to that /category /.

To fix my plan is to a. Remove canonical from /category / that way all those duplicate URLs don't have it either. B.  Redirect match all URLs that have /category / in them to homepage. (this is most important page where 50% of that content is and should be the main page).

Is this plan ok?

[advertisingcloud]

Any ideas follow MoZers? I can not find myself any other way to do it and think that would be the best and quickest way to fix?

[julie-getonthemap]

Instead of adding a bunch of no value links to your home page, which might be seen as black hat by Google, could you no-index the extra pages? It's not as if the page has any authority to distribute.