Do dead/inactive links matter?

[mgane]

In cleaning up the backlink profile for my parent's website, I've come across quite a few dead links. For instance, the links in the comments here: http://www.islanddefjam.com/artist/news_single.aspx?nid=4726&artistID=7290

Do I need to worry about these links? I assume if the links are no longer active, and hence not showing up in webmaster or moz reports, I can probably ignore them, but I'm wondering if I should try and get them removed regardless? I've read that google is increasingly taking into account references (i.e. website mentions that are not links) and I don't know if inactive spam links might leave a bad impression of a website. Am I being overly paranoid?

I imagine disavowing them would be pointless as you can't attach a nofollow tag to an inactive link.

[mgane]

Thanks. I had the feeling i was probably getting a bit carried away. I've been working so long at the link removals now, and I'm worried if I leave anything spammy we'll be stuck with this Penguin penalty forever, but I'll just ignore these links.

[SilverDoor]

I think you might just be being slightly paranoid.

I really wouldn't worry about things like that.

There's no evidence to support that search engines currently or will ever take things like that into account. I think it would really skew the results if they did.

Just ensure that your cleaning your link profile and disavowing anything that would be considered unrelated, spammy or manipulative.

If your trying to clean things up from a brand perspective then it can sometimes be worth attempting to get rid of no-follow links that look spammy or are in bad reference etc. But to be honest, that's normally only necessary for well established brands.

Hope this answers your question.

Thanks

SilverDoor

[Gijsbert]

If those are in comments I wouldn't care about it; if it would be in your pages I should for sure delete them.