Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
(the thread is closed now, so I can't post there)
It turned out that the client was pretty insistent about wanting to start using the .net domain that had been 301 redirected to his .com domain.
I decided to just try it. I took off the 301, uploaded a single placeholder index page with a nicely done description of the company and their contact info, good <title> and meta tags, and left it there to see if G would eventually spider.
Follow up report is yes. Within a month, googlebot came through and got the example.net index page, it is in the SERPS and doing amazingly well for a one-page site (#3 for its primary keyword).
.
If it goes "down under", I'll post another update.
:-)