In my organic seo efforts I renamed some internal URLs... The old pages still rank well for some other keywords and also some existing key words and still show up in searches two months later even though there are no more links to them from the website... Please be so kind and advise with the following: 1) Do I use use 301 redirect or do I wait for the search engines to update their database? 2) How long before the newly named page is indexed? I saw an immediate improvement in rankings but I was surprised that the old URL was shown not the new one (with the improved ranking)... Is this because the SE did not do a "deep" crawl? Thank you so much for your time and efforts in advising on how best to handle this type of seo work. I appreciate any advise.
Do a 301 redirect immediately. That tells the SE's where the new page is, and it should pass any links over as well.