Why am I getting links in my link report from sites that no longer exist?

[lightwurx]

So, I have a link report from Link Detox. And I'm going through all of them and considering what sites need to be removed. and trying to find emails and contact webmasters.  There is just one odd thing i'm starting to see more of.  A lot of links are on websites or webpages that no longer exist. The link no longer exists. Some of the domains are even available for purchase. Why are these links showing on the backlink report and are they really harming my website?  Also, do I need to add these links into the disavow document that I will submit to Google?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Benjamin,

Eduardo and Kevin are right - Link Detox's cache will be a bit old, hence why it's showing you data that's out of date. Google crawls much faster than most commercial tools (Moz's OSE included), so it's likely that those bad sites / pages have dropped out of its index already. Search for those page's URLs to make sure they're not still cached in Google's index. If they are, you'll have to wait it out (but it shouldn't take long for them to disappear if they're returning 404 or 410 status codes).

[EduardoRuiz]

If the pages no longer exist, then the links no longer exist, simple as that. As Kevin mentioned, this might be a cache issue that will get fixed sooner or later once these pages get recrawled.

If they were good links I wouldn't bother adding them to the disavow file (what if the site gets online again and the link remains there? You'd like to keep it). If it was a toxic link I would probably disavow, just to be on the safe side.

[kwoolf]

Without knowing what sites, I'm guessing these pages or the indexes have been cached. That data refresh will depend on how long it takes to recrawl all those sites. Just a hunch.