What if I link to a spammer

[Powdork]

There is a site that that one of my sites links to and it is a perfectly suitable organic match. Additionally, it is someone I know offline from a professional organization. Problem is there are a number of hidden links to doorway pages on the site. It is working for them, but I am not receiving any benefit from it. The saying goes that you can only be hurt by who you link to so this is kind of scary. I would hope that would only apply to linking to bad neighbourhoods involved in link spam rather than a haunted house in a good neighborhood.
Dropping the link is not contractually an option but I could put it in an external js file blocked by robots.txt. I would rather not however.
Any thoughts?

[bignet]

maybe you can relax until G busts them

[cabbie]

Its my experience that google wont punish you by linking to a bad neighbourhood as long as you are not part of that neighbourhhod.And providing that you don't link out AFTER Their site has been penalised

[Powdork]

After their penalized

Do you mean that preexisting links would be ok. Just links added after the penalty. Also. I think it's important to say it's not a bad neighborhood. It's more like internal bloating spam.

[caveman]

powdork, don't know if this helps exactly but we have a site with a small number of outbound links, larger number of inbound.

For a long while we linked out to an authority site that kept climbing in the SERP's. Finally it got higher than I thought it should, so we looked more closely and found hidden text done in very sneaky ways, plus some sneaky redirects.

Never hurt us one bit. But I yanked the link anyway.

No experience with linking to an obviously penalized site.

[Powdork]

It's starting to look more like an opportunity to me as the way back machine shows a link to the seo and it seems this is his/hers standard practice. I think i can turn these 180 doorway pages into 15-20 legitimate visible content pages and maybe lose a couple points on some searches but bring the site owner's relevant traffic up considerably.

[cabbie]

>>Do you mean that preexisting links would be ok. Just links added after the penalty.
I have sites linked to banned and penalised sites both without bad effect.As a matter of fact i still have those pre-existing links up. These sites were penalised after I linked to them But when I have linked to these banned sites after the ban is in place that site I linked from gets crunched.
This has happened several times on several sites just recently.