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I work with a large group of community sites and we were approached by a company called Text Link Ads to purchase links on our sites for SEO purposes. This means we can't add "nofollow" and the resulting page is crawl-able. This goes directly against Google's policy but I think it would be tough to find out exactly what we're doing. It could be a great revenue source and this company has many, many sites they work with. That said, this sounds like what you say right before something bad happens.

So, two part question: Has anyone worked with this company before? And should these links be avoided or are they not so bad?

Thanks in advance!

I should mention that this is a WordPress site and, with that, I may have answered my own question. Perhaps WordPress generates a robots.txt dynamically when the setting is active at Settings > Privacy?

Theresa,

I'm going to support the two answers here: creating a new account is not a good use of time.

The main reason, in my mind, is just that you wouldn't have anything to compare the new site with. If you have new code, new content, new everything, it's important to compare the changes with the old site to make sure you made positive changes.

The best example I can give of a scenarios where you'd want that historic data is with any page on the site that already ranks well. After the page changed, did traffic increase? Decrease? Time of page? It's good to know how these were changed.

I'll also add, historic analytic data can help you find problems caused by the move. Disallowed robots.txt from the test site? Structure issues? Many of these can be found out from looking at your analytic data and having a baseline is important.

Hope that helps!