Yesterday, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam team, answered a question that has been on the minds of many website owners since the recent updates.

Site A links to Site B because Site B has content that would be useful to Site A’s end users, and Google indexes the appropriate page. After the page is indexed, Site B’s content changes and becomes spammy. Does Site A incur a penalty in this case? MrTVTL, Toronto

Key takeaway:

Linking to a few spammy sites will help you; however, if you are linking to several of them, you may want to reconsider your linking habits.

For smaller sites, I see this as a manageable proper r problem; however, if you run a large site with lots of external links, it’s straightforward to lose track of where your outbound links are going.

Websites come and go, and it’s good to know when a site you are linking to has changed ownership.

To help keep track of my links in check, I have a few tools at my disposal.  One of them is called Screaming Frog SEO Spider.  It’s a crazy name – excellent results.