Google and Redirect pages

If I redirect in less than 3 seconds I'm not listed...

[bluegrass]

I recently acquired a competitor's domain name (domain2), which had a pretty good Google listing.

First I simply pointed the domain to my main domain (domain1). Within days the Google listing for domain2 had disappeared completely.

Then I set up an HTTP Redirect page that redirected after 3 seconds. Bang! domain2 got the listing that the old domain used to have!

Next I reduced the Redirect to 2 seconds (for a few hours), and the listing disappeared.

Upped it to 3 seconds and it is back where it was!

Is this normal?

[troels nybo nielsen]

How fast can you redirect visitors from page A to page B if you want search engines and human visitors to believe that page A actually exists?

If you redirect them at once page A has no real existence from the point of view of the visitors and should not be recognised as an existing page by Google and have any PR.

There have been quite a few webmasters who have tried to cheat search engines into believing that a page "really" existed and had lots of good keywords on it while in fact it was only a redirect.

And of course search engines know that. For this reason it is a risky game to fiddle with redirect times.

I am surprised that 3 seconds seem to be enough life time to make Google recognise a page as actually existing.