Does removing pages, so that they return 404, also remove any impact of spam links pointing to that page?

[ElaineDesignLobby]

A site with numerous spam links pointing to an old forum. The forum is now removed so do I need any further action?

thanks,

[mikeyqu]

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:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/C-OoaJfb0Yg

Based on this, you shouldn't even need to disavow those links after 404ing the URLs. Hope this helps and good luck!

Mike