Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Mike, the added id=ctl08_hm content is appended by the CMS it seems. It's not a choice made by the client or myself

I'm working with a client who uses a CMS which loads meta tags into their site through its backend. On-page I see this in the source:

Yes, I found that article too, but it wasn't real helpful.  I was hoping it was just a SEM/SEO agency using questionable tactics, but it seems like a bigger problem.

Thanks for the help.

I've seen several instances of this domain scraping and rehosting an entire site as a subdomain of 123productpages.com.  I know ReachLocal and YP have used similar techniques, but I can't find any references to 123productpages.com.

Not my client, but a specific example (dermatologist) of what I'm talking about: http://advderm.123productpages.com

If you were launching a new website to completely replace an older existing site on the same domain, would there be any value in temporarily deindexing the old site prior to launching the new site?

Both have roughly 3000 pages, will launch on the same domain but have a completely new url structure and much better optimized for the web.  Many high ranking pages will be redirected with 301 to the corresponding new page.

I believe the hypothesis is this would eliminate a mix of old & new pages from sharing space in the serps and the crawlers are more likely to index more of the  new site initially.

I don't believe this is a great strategy, on the other hand I see some merit to the arguments for it.

thanks. so how would you handle an instance where an organization provides services to multiple geographies, such as "IT services" for Boston MA, Portland ME and Burlington VT. Would you create a really large link encompassing the entire phrases? Or just link "IT services"?

I'm not just interested in sites to target, but also how to manage anchor text when you are targeting phrases that include a keyword + a geo modifier. Thanks!