Googlebot still hitting "orphaned" pages

I renamed many pages, nothing links to them, googlebot still hitting them

[barrister]

I had started a small catalog site by generating the pages using ASP scripts. Category pages ended up being named "catxxx.asp" and individual product detail page names used the convention "detailxxx.asp". Site was launched at the first of the year and by the first of this month is was indexed fairly well in the search engines. I have a fair number of good incoming links, some of them reciprocal but about ten PR5 and 6 incomings are one-way that I paid cash for.

I have gotten industrious and renamed almost all pages on the site (~400) so that the page name reflects its contents. I have gathered from reading this forum that such a change would be expected to only have a marginal improvement of ranking, if any - but I take great pride in this site and wanted everything neat and organized.

Categories are named now more like "widgets.asp" and details like "red-widget.asp". I left the old pages on the site because the search engines still link to those, intending to remove them later.

That was two weeks ago. Googlebot activity is fairly regular and occasionally high on my site. What bothers me is that initially the googlebot gobbled up all my newly named pages within two days of posting, but none of them are indexed yet. I am also noticing the googlebot checking back on the old pages A LOT. These old named pages are no longer referenced in the menus, backlinks, or incoming links at all!

This afternoon I put NOINDEX, FOLLOW on all of the old pages, hoping googlebot will get the hint.

My questions:

(1) Is the duplication of the pages the reason that the new page names are not being indexed? Or is it too early to draw any conclusions?

(2) Am I taking a risk putting NOINDEX on the old, SE established pages so soon?

[xlcus]

Another solution would be to put 301 redirects on the old pages. That way, both GoogleBot and real visitors get sent to the new pages.

[barrister]

Twice in the past week I have had a visit from "proxy.google.com"

Does this mean that somebody hand checked my site?

I decided to leave the old pages as-is with the "NOINDEX" tags place.