aristotle - 11:19 am on Mar 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

In doing some research for a new article, I recently came across a 12-year-old website that has quite a few broken external links, especially on its "links" page. Evidently this site hasn't been updated in a long time and nobody has bothered to check for broken links.

In fact there are many old websites that have a lot of broken links. Does anyone know if this can hurt their rankings? Has anyone at Google ever talked about this?