Does removing pages, so that they return 404, also remove any impact of spam links pointing to that page?
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A site with numerous spam links pointing to an old forum. The forum is now removed so do I need any further action?
thanks,
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Hey Elaine,
It looks very likely that 404ing a page would indeed remove the impact of spam links to those pages. I found an older article where Google said as much:
https://www.seroundtable.com/404-links-google-15427.html
Around the same time, John Mu said about the same thing:
Based on this, you shouldn't even need to disavow those links after 404ing the URLs. Hope this helps and good luck!
Mike
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