Google's John Mueller was asked if Google would penalize a site for old outbound links to a site that once hosted quality content and now changed ownership and hosts shady content. John said Google won't penalize such links; he said "no" and added, "the web is full of turmoil."
This was from a thread on Reddit that asked:
So the question is: how does Google treat OLD backlinks to a REAL business that unfortunately lost their domain? Does Google penalize my lodging website for linking to a domain that recently started serving shady content?
John Mueller replied:
No. It's good to keep things fresh overall, but the web is full of turmoil. That said & hopefully obviously, if your whole site's value has become obsolete, that's a different kind of problem than a handful of broken links.
Google kind of said this numerous times before, that Google is good at ignoring link cruft. Link cruft are old, spammy and irrelevant links accrued by the site over the years.
Google's stance on links, if you search this site, has been that it ignores links rather then demotes them, which has been its stance since 2016.
Here is a screenshot of this (I cropped it to just include the question and John's response):
Forum discussion at Reddit.
