There isn't a set time for Bing to index a website - there isn't with any search engine.  Bing's indexing can take over 3 months in some cases, although they have been getting faster lately.  The time it will take for Bing to index your site will vary based on certain factors, such as:

- Number of high quality, relevant backlinks that your site has pointing to it - you might have 100,000 links pointing to your site, but if they're low quality and irrelevant to the content of your site, they aren't going to do you any good

- the quality of your content (make sure your content is unique - run it through Copyscape to check for duplicate content issues)

- the quality that your site is designed to - make sure your site is validated and contains readable content - sites that are solely Flash are likely to cause issues.  Your site needs to be readable.

- how long does your site take to load?  You probably get impatient waiting ages for a site to load - think about MSNbot, which crawls millions of webpages every day - if your site takes ages to load it may well give up.  You can get a reasonable idea of how your site is performing using Website Analyzer.

- is your server returning the correct response?  Make sure that your pages return a 200 OK response - you can check using Web Sniffer.

- check for canonicalization issues

Example

* Both the non-www. and the www. version of your site return a 200 OK response

* Your homepage is called index.html

Your homepage could be accessed via

* http://www.yoursite.com

* http://yoursite.com

* http://www.yoursite.com/index.html

* http://yoursite.com/index.html

Bing will treat them as four different pages - with the same content on - which will cause duplicate content issues

Choose one version of your pages, and redirect all other versions (e.g. non-www.) to your preferred one.  This must be done in the form of a 301 redirect - that's the only one that Bing will follow.  302's and meta redirects tend to kill their crawler.

For guidance on setting up a 301 redirect, please read the links below:

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

That covers both Linux & Windows Servers
- any DNS issues such as missing nameservers?  These can cause issues for search engine crawlers - get a report using IntoDNS

Why hasn't the site been indexed?

Very likely because you haven't been patient enough.  As said above Bing is a slow crawler and can take 3 months + to index a site.  Check the factors above - does your site conform to them?

Optimize your site for indexing:

- Have good quality, unique content

- make sure your server returns the correct responses

- Submit the site to Bing

- Register your site with Bing Webmaster Tools (it doesn't guarantee you'll get indexed but it does provide you with useful information about your sites performance in Bing, but it can take a while to start showing data)

- submit a sitemap (this DOES NOT get your site indexed, but it's useful as it provides a useful list to Bing which will help them find pages that they might not otherwise discover.  XML is the format you'll need - there's plenty of free generators available.

Do not use the typical garbage sitemap generators that give you a changefreq of daily or always, a lastmod date of the day of generation, and a priority of 1.0 for every page - that sort of sitemap is completely useless to an SE crawler and will be ignored.

- get some links from good quality websites that are relevant to yours, post on some blogs, submit to some good quality & reputable web directories.  Don't go for paid links or link exchanging, that's likely to get you banned.

- Make sure your robots.txt file is giving the commands you want it to give - many webmasters accidentally give wrong commands in this file, causing massive problems.  Don't forget to add a reference in the file to your XML sitemap, if you have one.   The same goes for robots meta tags.

Not all of the site?

Bing is a slow crawler and so in general it is slow to conduct "deep indexing" of websites.  In addition to that, their indexing capacities are not as big as  Google's, and they will therefore only index pages that appear valuable - I suggest pointing a few good quality backlinks to every page that matters to you to encourage Bing to index it - I know that sounds dreadful, especially for huge sites, but it's the only way.

Why is Bing so slow in adding pages from my site to it's index?

It's slow  - be patient - and make sure you've optimized your site properly as described above.

Other pointers

* Before posting and saying "my site has vanished" or "my site isn't indexed at all", please try a site: query to determine whether or not there are pages indexed.