I truly believe that any webmaster entering any niche should investigate their online competition beforehand to know what they're up against and to see if their goals are realistic and affordable in both time and money.
As you may know, there are a few ways of investigating your competition online. Rankings, local rankings, citations, social mentions and of course backlinks. This question is not related to any of the above but is related somewhat because it has the same end goal which you'll see momentarily.
So hopefully my question and the answers to follow may aid some other webmaster encountering the same problem. I'll illustrate the problem as a scenario that'll hopefully give you an idea of what I believe and what I'm asking.
The Scenario
Your website has been ranking top for almost 2 years within a fairly competitive niche. Then, out of nowhere, you drop in ranking and a site that has never been on page 10, never mind position 10, is all of a sudden in top.
An immediate reaction might be foul play and you investigate their content and backlinks, only to find that their content is extremely thin and they have zero backlinks. So the possibility here is that the backlinks have not indexed for that site with whatever tool you use to check for these yet. Or, Google for whatever reason has made an error that will resolve itself.
4 months on and the same thin site with 0 backlinks (Only those from expected bot/scrapers - webstats etc) is still top in rankings.
So it looks like this site is here to stay and you start thinking about other reasons to why your site is being outranked.
One possible reason could be that your own rankings has slipped, along with many other sites but having all those sites drop in ranking is unrealistic so the only way forward would be to believe that they have earned their rankings through either reputation with Google or foul play. The conclusion here would be - or least mine - that the site in question has recently moved from one domain to another. They may just have a simple 301 re-direct from one domain to another, or they may have told Google within Google Webmaster Tools they have moved site. Scenario over.
The Question
My question is fairly simple and I apologise for the long paragraphs of text but I want a good idea of what is trying to be achieved here. Enough typing, here's the question!
Is it possible to find out if one domain has moved from one domain to another, either using 301 re-directs or moving in Google Webmaster Tools?