Will removing a 301 re-direct from an old spammed URL drop the links from our profile?

[BenjyH]

Essentially there is an old page that has been the target of an old school link building agency. There is a 301 re-direct from the old page to the newer version.

if I drop the 301 re-direct and update our sitemaps. Will those links be removed from our profile?

The old URL passes nothing in actual value & a link building campaign has been running on the new page for over a year.

[TomRayner]

In theory, yes it should.

The 301 is designed to pass on all of the link data of a page to its new destination.  That means if the redirected page has a spammy link profile etc., then it is being passed on to the new destination.  The latest video blog from Matt Cutts says that pretty much all of this strength is passed on.

Breaking the 301 will break that link.  It might take the crawler a while to recognise this, but it should do over time.  How long is quite hard to say - case in point, I saw an old URL ranking in the SERPs for over 2 weeks (while redirecting to a new page that ranked 1 place above it), before it was dropped from the SERPs. By the same principle, it could take awhile for the crawler to recognise that the old redirected links are not being pointed to the new page any more.