Removing a link to a 404 page

[WizardOfMoz]

Hi guys,

If I found a low quality or spam link pointing to my site, but the link points to a 404, 500, etc (inaccessible, error page),

Should I bother asking him to remove the link?

Thanks

[Dr-Pete]

Just to clarify - the page on your site no longer exists (404s/500s/etc.)? If the target of the link doesn't exist, the link should be more or less dead. I generally wouldn't bother disavowing. It's a bit situational, though - I'm not sure if you're working to disavow thousands of links and this is a large-scale problem or if there's just this one like or handful you're worried about. If you've got a handful of spammy links that all point to dead pages, I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

[Raydon]

I thought the OP was talking about having the spammy site remove the backlink which would be a little counter productive in my experience dealing with these sites admins, as opposed to disavowing that external spammy backlink.

EDIT: Here is a more recent clarification and semi-official word from google on how to use the disavow tool: it's not a surgical knife with ricing coating, it's a disavow tool... use it like a "machete"

but i guess if he meant removal of his own 404 url on his back-end, it would be wise to 301 them instead, especially if they do have other quality and non-spammy backlinks. But, I would still disavow a spammy 3rd party backlink anyway. no harm in doing that.

[GrowthHackingGooglesIndex]

The link recovery campaign mentioned above is probably called for and I second that a spammy link pointing to a 404 is not a good reason to disavow.  Avoid the tool if at all possible.

[MichaelYork]

Probably less important for the Spammy link, but there would be a decent chance you have other links pointing to the same broken pages which would be worthy of the 301 redirect. I'm a pretty big fan of not Disavow'ing unless absolutely necessary, it's a tad overused in my opinion.

[Raydon]

Even though it is linkingEither that, or use the now good ol disavow tool on Google webmaster tools, far faster and easier imho.

I would remove them or disavow them immediately.

But it would be good to wait and hear from more seasoned folks (10+ years) who lurk in the dark around here often...

edit: I would say use disavow tool with caution and ENSURE 100% that the backlink source is spammy and low quality and sure to be caught in googles net sooner or later. but i do believe in proactively taking care of this issue to a good extent rather than waiting and seeing the damage rolling out. this can also be based on the total number of followed links that you have, on a small scale, it becomes more of an important task compared to when you have thousands or tens of thousands of links.

However. just to make it clear how bad this can be if left ignored, one of our niche clients has a total of no more than 400 backlinks so far and their direct local competitor has some 60,000 plus. and is a few years senior of a domain based on existence history. yet with us proactively taking care of low quality sites that we find constantly, we have been able to raise their DA and so far reach and tie with the bigger local competitor.

a good portion of those 60000 backlinks are spammy and in need of being removed by manual request or disavow. and i bet quite a few of them end up on old and expired 404s, but the effect cannot be more obvious when these issues are not taken care of on time.