Building links to a 404 page?

What is the effect (if any) of building links to a page that doesn't exist on your site, essentially a page that returns a 404 error?Will these link affect your site?Reason I ask is because I had a bunch of spammy links pointing to one page on my site but I deleted the page and now the links are just pointing to a 404 error page on my site.

Hobokook,

There is evidence that if there are links leading to pages that do not exist, Google doesn't give credit to those links (at least long term).

Here is a post from Cutt's on a similar topic and he mentions that links leading to non-existent pages aren't given credit (after the screenshots in the post).

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/free-direct-text-links/

Hope that helps,

Shawn

That makes sense, why would Google allow link juice to be funneled to a custom 404? It'd lead to higher SERP's for those pages.