DEAD LINKS - a problem?

SiteMap Page has many dead links... is that a problem with google?

[moreleads]

I have several sitemap pages on my sites that over time have dead links to pages I have deleted. I have NOT removed the dead links, since it is very time consuming to update the sitemap pages.

Is that a bad idea? Will google penalize me for having keyword heavy links on pages that lead actually nowhere?

Thanks for any feedback.

[jimbeetle]

Why are you so worried about Google and not your site visitors? How many dead links will you click before giving up on the site?

Get rid of them.

[Mohamed_E]

It is not really very time consuming to prune your dead links and, as jimbeetle so well says, it looks very non-professional to your users to have them.

There are a variety of free link checling tools available, a Google search will show you the top ones.