How do I get search engine to update links?

I have recently updated my website with a new design which resulted in new pages to replace the old pages. The index page contains links to the new pages.

I still do have the old pages on the site, and my problem is that some of the search engines are still showing the "old" pages and not the new pages.

For example: The site is listed on Google and Altavista. The listings on Google are up to date, but the listings on Atlavista are the still links to the old pages.

Example: Page1.html was replaced with bio.html. Altavista is still showing the Page1.html when I search the site.

How do I get Altavista to update their links/pages?

Should I use a META tag to refresh to the new page, or should I use Apache's Redirect command in the .htaccess file to redirect the request to the new page.

Which would be the best way so I do not loose the listing at Altavista (since they apparently have switched to a Pay for listing program).

you can do a meta revisit for the future bots and spiders, but the links that are already in the search engines... you're not going to get those out. Your best bet is to redirect those pages to the new ones and hope those pages drop out sooner than later.

since those pages are cached as html then about the only redirect you could do is a meta refresh, possbily a .htaccess file would be good.

there's really not much you can do. Yahoo Slurp is slow too. Try to get more backlinks that may make some search engine to index your pages more frequently

I decided to go the .htaccess redirect method based on the article found at:

http://www.thinkhost.com/services/kb/301-redirect.shtml

Thanks for everyone's responses.

And you can do anything but wait. They may take four to 8 weeks to remove old pages. That happened with me also. Just concentrate on getting fresh inbound links and get the site crawled more frequently.

Yep, it should almost be a standard answer:

More links = more bot visits = quicker updates

After you get enough links all the major (and a lot of the minor) bots will visit your site multiple times a day.