Whatever they are doing now sure is better than before, but a waiting period would be an interesting phenomenon.

After the old URL disappears, did you change all the linking to the new page to the new URL?

I can imagine a lag time before the new URL shows up and ranks based strictly on 301 links, but if the new page has links pointing to its new/correct URL, then obviously it should appear in the results as soon as a brand new page. If it doesn't, then the vacation from the results must be "forced" because a 301 is in place.

Of course a forced vacation is better than a permanent death sentence...

According to Bing, the redirect should take hold within a few days, not weeks.

One of the more general problems that I regularly see regarding 301s - especially when done on a large scale, is that the major pages get spidered and changed, but this breaks the links to the old urls. If the old urls ONLY had internal links, then a crawler will never get to the page again through meritocricy. You may need to find a way to help it!

The problem I see is how will we deal with this as and when Bings market share increases. With Bing now, it looks as if it makes sense to more or less forget about the 301 and simply let Bing find your moved page, But with Google the 301 is for sure the way to go.

Can you imagine the dilema you would be faced with if there was an even market split between G and B.

Mack.

I'd use 301s with Google in mind now given the market share reality, but also the evolution of Bing. They have gone from one month ago not being able to handle 301s at all to handling older ones now (apparently) just fine. If they are slow to pick up redirects that are less than one month old, it would seem logical to assume they will handle that properly soon too.

Receptional, I don't understand what you are saying about breaking links. Don't you only change the internal links to new pages AFTER Google (at least) picks up the new URL and discards the old one? If Bing just takes longer to do that, I don't see the issue... assuming "longer" is a month or so more.

If the old urls ONLY had internal links, then a crawler will never get to the page again through meritocricy.

Actually, I posted fairly recently about the opposite of this happening in another thread here in this forum. I redirected about 100 URLs and all MSNBot did was request the old locations for days even though there were no links pointing at them any longer... I track the big 3 bots fairly closely on the site and know with certainty the old URLs were requested, even though they did not show up in the Bing index using the site: operator and were not linked.

Again, there were no links to the locations, internal or external and they were still requested.

* They were actually requested by all 3 search engine bots: Googlebot was the best at dumping the old locations with Slurp second and MSNBot lagging behind... Interesting to me, is what happened after the old locations were dropped, because MSNBot spidered the entire site very deeply after dropping the old locations and Slurp is still lagging behind there.

Googlebot has been the best at discovering and adjusting to the changes overall, but MSNBot is definitely second.

Some other notes on the spidering of the site I'm referring to: GBot found and spidered the XML Sitemaps first. Slurp second. MSNBot has yet to request the XML Sitemaps even though I submitted them to MSN and not either of the others. (The Sitemap Index is linked in the robots.txt according to the standard.)

There are actually a series of XML Sitemaps and GBot visits all of them frequently, Slurp has visited the main one and only requested one of the additional XML Sitemaps so far, MSNBot has not requested them at all but found most of the URLs on the site anyway.

The site has extensive HTML sitemaps for visitors and to supplement the XML Sitemaps for the bots, and these may be what MSNBot was working from to find the URLs. It was either those or standard internal links, because the site has very few inbound links and there are two new large sections to the site which have no (I mean 0) inbound links, but MSNBot has found nearly all URLs anyway.

Overall, I would have to say GBot is still the best at picking up changes, with MSNBot second and Slurp lagging way (weeks) behind... Maybe Y! decided it was to let Slurp stop at the bar to 'Slurp' something different for a change? Dunno, but IMO and from what I've seen out of the 3 MSNBot is definitely number 2 and on the way up...

Brett Yount from Bing said like this about 301 redirect at the official forum:

by design, our crawler usually takes 2-3 crawls before it registers the redirect.

[bing.com...]