HTTP URLs Still in Index

[LoganRay]

One of the sites I manage was migrated to secure 2 months ago. XML sitemaps have been updated, canonical tags all have https:, and a redirect rule was applied. Despite all this, I'm still seeing non-secure URLs in Google's index. The weird thing is, when I click those links, they go to the secure version.

Has anyone else seen weird things with Google not properly indexing secure versions of URLs?

[ThompsonPaul]

Just make certain your http > https redirect is a 301, not a 302 (A lot of the examples on the web for this redirects are actually wrong in this regard). A 302 will make it difficult to get the old URLs to drop out of the index.

[LoganRay]

Thanks for your input Casey. I'm dealing with about 4,000 URLs, so I think I'll go with the patience method!

[mediawyse]

Hey Logan, I wouldn't say this is a "strange behavior." I've seen it take several months for all non-http URLs to drop out of the index when making a SSL switch.

That being said, you "could" go ahead and do a fetch request on the individual URLs in the old HTTP verified Google Search Console account and get Google to follow again the URLS to their HTTPS counterparts. That certainly won't hurt.

I had a similar issue with a client site who moved to HTTPS but forgot to noindex the dev site and all of that was indexed. They had 700+ URLs in their account in April and they still have 4 of those URLs in search as of today. It just takes awhile for all that stuff to dropout of the index.

Personally, I'd just be patient. You having the redirects in place is what is important. Google will sort it out...eventually.