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Thanks Dirk, this is the direction we were leaning.

Thanks for the tip StreamlineMetrics... Curious though, how are you able to get keyword data, etc. to pass through when Google strips it out. Do we not run the risk of violating some other Google policy?

Thanks for the replies - I think you nailed it JaneCopland! This was our gut, but figured it couldn't hurt to have a few other SEOs weigh in.

Thanks Miriam, these are some great sources! Unfortunately, not seeing much about call lead tracking, but maybe using custom urls and google analytics is the best we can do. Other than making the URL look a little strange, is there any downside of using this method? Thanks again, Gridless

Agreeing with Brent on password-protection. And everything else he said. Also, if these are CMS-driven sites, I can almost guarantee you you've got paths pointing back to the dev-version. Probably absolute links to images and such. I've had that happen before. Remove the database and files from your dev directories and see what breaks on the live-site

@Simon agreed - could be a 302 & check WMT Also, it may not be a bad thing having results in position #1 & #2 in the SERPs Means your client has listings in the best positions Another option could be to use a rel=canonical to wipe the site out very quickly - see Rand's example of how he removed his old blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday (generally, be extremely cautious with this approach but given your goals , i.e. remove site from index, it should be fine)

Here is a theory... because I am not really that involve with those 2, if I remember properly Bing/Yahoo are using the same search technology, so results shouldn't be that different, and my guess is they try to do the same as Google, showing what seems more relevant, but they are not as advanced yet so the probably add more weight to the H1 in the case of your website. As I said, its just my theory, I am not so into those 2. Happy to help!