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Here is my two cents and take it for what it's worth.  We took a .com site written in English and hosted in the U.S., duplicated the website content but redesigned the website.  The duplicated content and new design was then hosted in Germany hoping to target UK and English searches in Europe, the website was a complete flop.  We then took the duplicate content and had a professional translation service convert the exact content on the U.S. website to German and updated the new site and it started performing very well.  We took the same approach in France and our other target markets; however, it didn't work in the UK.

If a user can easily navigate between the two websites I would recommend using cross domain tracking.  Then you can setup a Global Profile to track both websites together and individual profiles for each website.  This would eliminate the duplication of visits within your analytics and should provide the information your looking for as cookies would be passed with the link method between your websites.

The duplication mentioned above is a result that when a user enters site1 organically for the first time they are considered unique then if they navigate to site2 through a link, they are now a unique visitor on site2.  So when you look at how many visitors you have that particular visitor is counted twice.  Now maybe this doesn't matter to you but having worked with websites that pass visitors very easily we found cross domain tracking very important.

I attached a video from Google about cross domain tracking Hash() is no longer needed and is not noted in the video but this should help you set up cross domain tracking should you decide it's needed.

watch?v=gMMi5aFQmtM

Thankfully, I am smart enough to make sure I am not getting local or personalized results but because of your comment I took a closer look and noticed as you did they do not seem to rank but for whatever reason SEO Moz when using the Keyword Difficulty took ranks them at #4, obviously a glich with the system.

Thanks for looking into this and I will send SEOmoz a note but they likely already are working on it.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/012409.html --"From Google: 301s pass PR and related signals appropriately. Usually takes a couple of weeks for things to smooth out, though."

As noted in the details the keywords I was referring to were "patio furniture" and "outdoor furniture" and why don't I think they should rank wow let me explain.

They aren't focused on either keyword in the title tag of the ranking page, their domain and page authority are much, much lower than the other websites listed on the first page.

Their incoming links aren't from high authority pages nor contain exact match keyword anchor text to the keywords they rank for.

I can go on and on Alan but the question wasn't what my evaluation of the site is, I was just curious if anyone else could give me insight to why they think this website was ranking for such competitive keywords with what I would call an average website.

I was looking at the competitiveness of ranking for the keywords "patio furniture" & "outdoor furniture" and was shocked to see www.southernhearth.com ranking so well.  While I am just getting into the research, I was unable to see anything that would justify it's rank.  What are your thoughts?