Yesterday Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam team, answers a question that is on a lot of Website owner’s minds since the recents 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

Here is the takeaway – 

Linking to a few spammy sites will not hurt you, however, if you are you linking to several of them you may want to reconsider your linking habits.

For smaller sites I don’t see this as being as big of a problem, however, if you run a large site, with lots of external links, its very easy to loose track of where your outbound links are going.

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

To help keep track of my links in check I have a few tools as my disposal.  One of them is called Screaming Frog SEO Spider.  Crazy name – amazing results.