How Does Google Treat Transient Links?

Do links count after they're gone?

[Dolemite]

On the small portion of the web that's updated frequently, links come and go as news happens, articles become stale, and resources are taken down or moved. As this happens, the linked resource may be just as pertinent to the original anchor text, but with the link gone, how is it to be judged by google? Does it return to its previous level of relevance to the anchor text, or does it retain some influence by having been linked?

I think its safe to assume that PR ceases to transfer, so let's focus on relevance/SERPs.

In the "old google" we might see a removed link remain significant and appear in backlinks for an entire update cycle. There's anecdotal evidence [webmasterworld.com] that the new google factors in backlinks much sooner than it displays them in a link:domain search, but does it also factor them out with the same expeditiousness? Is that a slower process, or is there something more intelligent going on than a simple 1/0, on/off test? BTW, I'm just posing the question, not suggesting anything.

[Dolemite]

I'm going to bump this and hope that's OK, since it was at the bottom of page 2 by the time it was approved.

[cabbie]

I have a link from a pr8 credited to me that hasn't been there for 2 months.Last week i got dropped from the serps as I would've expected without that link.However Google is still showing that link in my backlinks.
I have since regained my position but that is probably cos I just got a pr7 site to link to me.
Alltheweb has always been slow to drop links and maybe Google are doing the same now as a way of giving the benefit of the doubt that the link has gone.
They do this with 404's where they dont drop the site from their index for a couple of months to make sure that the site was not just temporarily down.
If this is the case it allows some manipulation of transfering links around

[dougmcc1]

"does it retain some influence by having been linked"
I don't think this is the case. A link is a vote for the page being linked to. No links, no votes. Who wants to read stale news? If it is still good information, people will still link to it.