How long until links 'fall off'?

[GFujioka]

If I have site A linking to site B, and take down the links - does anyone have any experience in about how long they take to 'fall off', that is stop appearing in Webmaster Tools or Moz? I'm going on three weeks currently. Perhaps this takes months?

[AlanMosley]

WMT can take a long time for anything to update.

but the search engines would have that change by now in there index

[JaneCopland]

The next time Google crawls the previously-linking page, it should note that the link is gone, as it will cache the page. Any benefit or detriment that the links was passing on should technically be nullified. Moz's crawl will update when it re-visits the page as well, but the frequency of Moz, Googlebot and the updating WMT is really hard to predict. If the link is on a highly-traffic, well linked-to page, G and Moz should pick it up quickly. If not, it can take a long time.

The Moz index is updated about every 3 - 4 weeks; again, the removal of one individual link requires the latest crawl to have noticed that it has gone, which is likely but not a certainty.