Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?

[RosemaryB]

Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL.  They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https).  However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google.   We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.  
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages?   We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen.   We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages.   However we felt this was pretty drastic.

Any recommendations would be much appreciated.

[N1ghteyes]

You could use a tool like Xenu to check that all of the urls on your clients website do indeed now redirect to https, or to be extra sure, you should add a redirect to the websites .htaccess (or web.conf on windows hosting) to force a 301 redirect on all http pages to https.

As for indexing http, if they redirect to https correctly when you view them, then you'll just have to wait for google to catch up. No harm done in the mean time.

[max.favilli]

Redirect with 301 the old urls to the new https ones. Check gwt for any crawl errors for weeks if not months (depends on how much index pages you have and how many are crawled per day) and fix them, if you have.

you should then see traffic move from http to https in gwt

again depending on the total number of pages indexed you have and the crawling rate you have, it make takes months, even many months before all pages are re-indexed and starts showing in SERP as https

but that's normal and it's not bad at all