Can bad text URLs hurt pages?

[loopyal]

If you have some pages that contain plain text URLs (not anchored links) that used to be good URLs, but are now bad, either because the website shut down or because it has been acquired by someone else and is now parked (or worse) - are those URLs enough to cause quality problems?

For example:

This information was brought to you by Waymaker http://www.waymaker.net

These aren't the only ones.

And yes, I know I should fix them, but there are probably 10,000 pages like it.

I will fix them, but its not something I can do in a few minutes.

(this one is easy to fix programmatically, but others are a lot more complex)

So my question is: do you have actual experience that these are bad enough to cause ranking problems (making them low quality)

[loopyal]

Thank you Bryan.

These are links on my site in old stories.

Some aren't links, as in the example above, they are just plain text - no anchor tag.

Some are anchor links, to website are now defunct

Some are anchor links to websites that have now been parked

Some are anchor links to websites that have now been taken over by unrelated people.

So my aim is to clean them all up, but I'll do the most damaging ones first, because there are a lot of pages.

[loopyal]

Thank you.

I am fixing both types now.

[BryanCasson]

If bad anchor tech could hurt your quality then every competitor would be linking to you with bad anchor text. You simply do not get the same quality benefit as good anchor text. Put it this way:

Site A = Vet
Site B = Dog Parlor
Site C = Car Sales

Site A ---> Site B with Anchor Text "Wash Your Dog" = 9/10 Quality Link
Site A ---> Site B with Anchor Text "www.dogservice.com" = 7/10 Quality Link
Site A ---> Site C with Anchor Text "Car Sales" = 2/10 Quality Link
Site A ---> Site C with Anchor Text "ww.carsales.com" = 1/10 Quality Link

As shown above, relevant links are what counts, Anchor text just gives you a added benefit

[Highland]

I don't think that bad anchor tags can hurt you unless you're pointing to bad pages on your own site. Linking to a 404 page, for instance, will cause bots to try and spider the bad page instead of a good page. The concept here is called crawl budget and it's not devastating, it just slows down indexation.

I don't think a plain text reference can hurt you at all.