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You need to 404 the old XML sitemaps.  Google loves to hang onto data in old sitemaps unless you 404 them. These should help https://www.lockedowndesign.com/prevent-google-from-crawling-old-sitemaps/ https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en

Hi there, This is odd, 4 weeks is a long time and something is likely going wrong. Are you positive that your 301s have been implemented correctly? Have you received any messages in Search Console/GWT that are relevant? I would also do as Ikkie suggests and submit prominent URLs which have yet to be indexed here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6259634?hl=en Please let me know if these checks fail or if you'd like to PM me the URL and I'll take a closer look. Hope this helps, Daniel

Finally we were able to get a 200 response. Thank you for your input.

Angela, we usually recommend looking at each page separately and determining the value of each URL. You may end up with a new site structure, but there may be pages on the site that you need to keep because they shouldn't be redirected to the new page on the new structure. I prefer not to redirect a URL if it doesn't have to be redirected. You will need to redirect all pages from the old site to the new site, and it makes sense to redirect those to the most appropriate page. But, when it comes to a new site structure, I wouldn't necessarily redirect a page if it doesn't have to be redirected.

Hi, If you have confirmed the pages are actually indexed, I really wouldn't worry about it. I have seen numbers of pages indexed jump around in the past on many different sites. -Andy

Hi Angela, Officially google recommend that for search results without filters you should use either a rel canonical to a 'view all' results pages OR rel prev/next (not both in other words). Now with filters that changes slightly and then you should implement rel prev/next as normal but also rel canonical each filtered page to its relevant NON filtered page. So for example you have: Page is /all/best/2** and **meta data is: So you rel canonical not to the first non filtered page as you mention but to the relevant paginated non filtered page if you see what I mean. It can get a bit confusing, be sure to check the final results well to avoid unpleasant surprises. Hope that helps!

Normally i fix soft 404 issues by redirecting or adding content to the page. So if you can't redirect then you could try adding some unique content to those pages. Basically its like they're saying the content is soooo thin or non-existent that the page looks like it 404s despite serving a 200 status.