How long does the juice flow after link is removed?

[apauto]

Let's say today, I get a direct link off of the yahoo.com homepage which is a PR9.

The link is up for a month, and Google caches the link, gives me link juice, and I'm rockin'.

Once Yahoo removes the link, how long until Google realizes this, and stops giving the link juice? is it instant, or does some juice always stay as sort of a:

"Well, Yahoo.com is a trusted site, and they linked to widgets.com so even though the link is gone, we will still give it better ranking"

Hope you guys are having a good Sunday morning :)

[buckworks]

A friend of mine had this exact situation. His site got a "cool site" type of link from someone's PR9 home page that lasted for a few weeks. Once the link was gone there was no residual effect that we could discern, although the PR6 link from the archives was a nice addition to the mix.

Alas, that company was bought out, and their site went off the air, archives and all.

Lesson learned: high PR links are nice while they last but a backlink profile with lots and lots of small links will be more stable.

[g1smd]

If you make a habit of gaining and losing such links, I'd guess that would show up on the "unnatural patterns" radar.

[aristotle]

Isn't it possible that Google might continue to use the anchor text of the lost link as a small factor in its ranking algo, even though there is no longer any link "juice" associated with it.?

[buckworks]

Anything is possible, but I've never seen any evidence of that.

So far as I've ever been able tell, when a major link is lost, the benefits of that link will fade out roughly as fast as they faded in.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I have an experience for a high PR link however, it was back in December 2007.

For one of my site I had got a PR9 (Home page) back link from a reputed site as we had engaged into a business partnership with them. As a result my Homepage rank went to PR7 without the need of any other link.
This site was completely new with PR9 link as the first link.

We did build some other links for the site but not aggressively as we were ranking well for high competition keywords in our niche. Yes, had done good on-page optimization.

After 1 year in December, 2007 when our business partnership ended with the authority site, they removed the link and as a result we went to PR1 with the next update and rankings were almost gone.

[apauto]

Ankit - was the link on the PR9 homepage, or on a different page?

[AnkitMaheshwari]

It was on PR9 Home page from the bottom of the page. We had both Image(logo) as well as text link present

[BradleyT]

Not long at all. And why would it? If a site got "hi-jacked" and a bunch of SPAM links were put up should they continue flowing juice after they're taken down? If someone puts up a link because they love a product or company and that product or company changes drastically causing the person to remove the link should juice still flow?

[BradleyT]

And to add -
We sometimes link from our homepage to landing pages which are on a subdomain and get no other links. The landing pages will then get indexed and rank highly while the link is up. Once we take the link down it only takes a few days for the landing pages to basically drop out of the SERPs.