I spotted a useful tidbit for SEOs in the Bing Forums today. Brett Yount from Bing Webmaster Center team explained how Bing picks up on 301 redirects.
Brett said it can take two to three crawls from Bing to register a 301 redirect in their index. Brett said:
By design, our crawler usually takes 2-3 crawls before it registers the redirect.
I wonder how many crawls Google takes to do the same thing? I can see why you would want to wait at least for a second crawl to confirm a 301 redirect is indeed legit.
We had some reports recently that Bing is handling 301s much better now than they have in the past.
Forum discussion at Bing Forums.