Best place to spy on a competitor's inbounds is
yahoo site explorer - punch in your competitor's url at the top. In terms of Google visits, it depends on the strength of your site. If it's weak and has few inbounds, ie can be days, weeks. If it's strong and has inbounds on other, oft crawled pages, then it can be minutes.
Nina: 3 quick suggestions if you want to make it easier for spiders to find new pages. 1)
replace the javascript menu with a CSS list-based one 2) create an
xml sitemap and submit it to google 3) create a robots.txt and add the location of the sitemap in there for
auto discovery. Hope this helps.