Google does not penalize a site for outbound links that pointed to legitimate businesses years ago, even if those domains later changed hands and now host spam. John Mueller confirmed this in a Reddit thread, responding to a site owner worried about links from a lodging website to a domain that had since turned shady.
Mueller called it link cruft, saying the web is full of turmoil and that Google is built to ignore stale or repurposed links rather than punish the sites that once pointed to them. He drew one distinction: a handful of broken or outdated links differs from a site whose entire value proposition has gone obsolete.
The answer restates a Google position dating back to at least 2016, when the company said it discounts spammy links instead of demoting the pages carrying them.
For link-audit practice, this means teams tracking outbound links can stop treating domain-decay monitoring as a ranking emergency and file it under routine content maintenance.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported John Mueller’s Reddit response on this development.
