If you linked to a site years ago and it has since changed owner and started hosting junk, Google does not penalize you for it. That was John Mueller's answer to exactly this question this week, and he added a line worth keeping: the web is full of turmoil.
What was actually asked
The question is the one every older site eventually runs into. You publish an article, you cite a useful source, and years later that domain expires, gets bought, and turns into a spam page or something worse. Your link is still there, still pointing at it.
Google's position is that this does not count against you.
Why that is the expected answer
Google has said for years that it is good at ignoring link cruft: the old, irrelevant and spammy links a site accumulates over time. The same logic runs in both directions. A link from a bad site does not hurt you, it simply does not count. A link to a site that later went bad is treated the same way.
The alternative would be unworkable. Every publisher would be responsible for the future behavior of every domain they ever cited, forever, including domains they have no control over and no way to monitor.
What to do anyway
Nothing, if you are only worried about rankings. But there is a reason to check your outbound links that has nothing to do with Google.
A reader who follows a citation and lands on a parked domain full of ads learns something about your article, and it is not good. The link was your evidence. If it now leads nowhere, the claim it supported reads as unverifiable.
So the practical version is short:
- Check the outbound links in your most-read articles once or twice a year. Not all of them, just the ones people actually open.
- Replace a dead source with an archived copy, or with a different source that still stands.
- If a link now points at something harmful, remove it. For the reader, not for the algorithm.
- Keep using
rel="sponsored"on paid or affiliate links andrel="nofollow"where you cannot vouch for the destination. That is about disclosure, and it has not changed.
The part worth remembering
Link rot is not a penalty risk. It is a credibility risk, and it grows quietly as an archive gets older. The fix costs an hour a year and only matters on the handful of pages that carry your traffic.