tedster - 1:26 pm on Aug 6, 2002 (gmt 0)

I had a recent experience along these lines.

I work one site that has about 400 recip links, all very topical -- or at least they were when they were set up. One of those other businesses let their domain name expire - and it was bought by a Web slumlord. Before you know it I had lots of inbound links from a bad neighborhood that I was also linking out to.

Never got a PR0 from it, but I did see some slippage on the SERPs, which turned around two months after I dropped the bad link. I can't prove cause and effect, but it sure seemed to be related.

The lesson for me was just what everyone here is saying - check your links, and not just to see if they're broken. Nothing stays nailed down on the web.