How can I see what if any websites are being 301 redirected to a competitor?
For instance…I have a website…
and I know that http://www.hondaofatlanta.com is one of a couple of domains that are being 301 redirected to it. How could I find out info similar to this for a competitors site?
is there any tool
No tool that I’m aware of but why does it matter? Redirecting an entire domain with a 301 does absolutely nothing for you in terms of search engine rankings. If a spider visits a URL that is redirected with a 301 they simply won’t index the original URL because there is no site to index and it’s been redirected.
This may help if your users are directly typing a URL into the address but it’s pretty unlikely that they would type something like hondaofatlanta.com all on their own.
This tool from SEOMoz will show you 301s - www.OpenSiteExplorer.org
That’s not really true. If you have a domain with a bunch of IBLs and you decide to stop hosting a site at that domain or to rename your site, you should definitely do a 301 on that domain to keep all that link juice flowing to the new domain name, otherwise you just lose all those links. It’s standard practice.
And if you’re in a particularly competitive field and want to hide your backlinks from your competitors, this is a good way to do it.
I agree - maybe I should have been more clear. I was referring to the practice of purchasing brand new domain names and 301 redirecting them to your main website. I have clients ask me if they can do that all the time so it seems to be a common practice which yields no results if the domain is brand new. 
This may be the most original SEO idea I have heard in awhile!
Right, I try to talk people out of doing this unless the new domains are genuinely useful to their users and even then to only get a few, not 20 or 30 like some people have wanted to do.
Not quite sure how that would work? What’s to stop me seeing the 301’d link in a link report, then doing a report on that domain to see what links are coming into it?
For example, I did a lnk analysis on www.Confused.com and got these results for 301’d links coming into that domain, I then picked one of the 301’d links and did another anlaysis on it and [URL=“http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/angliaforum.com%252Flinkek%252F61-szolgaltatasok%252F95-oesszehasonlito-oldal.html/a!links”]got this result .
OK, not the most stunning backtracking ever, there’re probably much more intersting examples out there if you take the time to find them, but you see how it can be done.
It would be a real pain for someone to find the backlinks of a 301 redirected domain…finrst they would have to sort though all the backlinks, the do a backlink chech on that domain…also most dont know about this.
Or does the tool above do all the leg work? Because i did not see hondaofatlanta.com as a 301 to edvoyleshonda.com when I used the opensite tool.
You might have to get the Pro version to see all your links.
How could I find out info similar to this for a competitors site?
By seeing what he owns and visiting those domains.
site:domaintools.com $competitorname or $competitorpostcode or $competitorsnameserver