For example, you activate SSL on your website and move to https://yourdomainname.com from http://yourdomainname.com. Or, somehow you had both www and non www versions live and indexed in Google. You have redirected this all old versions to one, yet Google is not deindexing those versions.
A similar thing happens to this guy (facebook post), and I had written solutions to that in comments.
Here is this article I am sharing that Solution, with a little-polished version.
My website has different versions indexed on Google - Solution
1. If you are using WordPress, then for https redirection use Really simple SSL - a WordPress Plugin.
2. For www redirection, if the redirection is done properly, Google will do what's necessary, it may take some time though. Be a little patient.
I was facing the same issue, had a hard time getting rid of old URLs, but it took time and now it is fine.
Things what I think affects:
1. Write new content regularly. If you write 1 each day, write each day, if you write once a week, well, then just write once a week. Stay active.
If you don't write articles regularly Google doesn't like to crawl your website and waste crawl budget to find nothing new. Google takes much longer time to crawl your website again.
2. Make sure your website is smooth, I mean, make your website is free from messy code, code junk that makes it difficult to crawl, or even blocks crawling some portion of a page. Google crawler doesn't have that kind of time, it will just leave.
Sometimes it happens, you update a page, when you check cache:theurlofapage.com, you see Google has crawled recently (You can see it at the top - "It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on...") but the cache page doesn't show the update. I think it happens because crawlers find difficulty crawling the page, and leave it incompletely crawled.
3. I haven't tried though, maybe you can try, placing few old links (that you have redirected, yet indexed in Google) in an article in a Blogspot blog or quora or something like that, and submit that article to Google, check after few days.
4. Have Google Search Console set up for all the versions of your website (www, non www, http, https), and track how many pages are indexed or deindexed. Check the Coverage menu in Google Search Console.
You should see a slowly old URLs are getting deindexed and more and more new URL getting indexed.
These are just my theory based on my observations, not an established fact. When I have a concrete solution for this issue, will update the article again.
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