Google showing same url after changing page name

[rgautam]

I've changed the name of some url and redirected them using Redirect 301 (.htaccess) file. Google bot has crawling my site every day but it is showing old url and old titles. Is it necessary to return Error 404 for old url to update into new one?

Please suggest...

[tedster]

What's the time scale here?

It does take a while sometimes, but eventually the original url should be dropped from the index and the url for your new, 301 "target" location should show. If the redirect has been in place for more than a couple weeks, I'd suggest checking your servfer headers to be sure that the old url is actually returning a 301 http status.

[BradleyT]

I did this recently (first week in April) and Google has updated all SERPs to the new URLs. They also changed our sitemap links to the new URLs while keeping the same link text for them.

So I would give it a month or two to work itself out. If it doesn't work out the first thing I would do is check the old URLs with an http status checker tool (I believe webmaster world has one in the control panel) to make sure a 301 is being returned.