What to do with broken links?

I have an aged PR2 news site with over 1000 posts and I have noticed there are many broken outbound links to a couple websites that have closed down.

What would be the best 'use' of these broken back links? Should I manually change the links to point to other posts within my site? Try to swap the links with other sites? Or....?

Most likely, your forum software maker has a mod to deal with broken outgoing links.

yeah set up a mod to remove them

Perhaps I should clarify:

Removing the broken links is not the issue... I can have that done easily. And they are not forum links, they are contextual links within solid blog posts on my site.

The question is this: rather than having those links go out to nothing or removing them altogether, what would you suggest I change those links to: a similar post within my site? a similar post on another site? Or...?

The posts where these links are found get decent traffic so I was wondering if I should try to sell the outbound links to other similar sites, swap the links with other sites, etc. I believe there is value in these links and was wondering if anyone else has ever capitalized on something like this...

If I just wanted to remove them, I would have already done it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jax


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"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." ~Winston Churchill

If you remove the links the OBL will decrease so it's quite possible your news site will go higher in serps for the keywords it ranks.

It is possible to sell contextual links but I think they are valued at your PR and unfortunately PR2 is not valued too highly. Why don't you list a few and depending on the niche you may get a decent price, in the mean time link all the others to internal pages with a view to selling them too if you get a good price for the first few sales.

Thanks xrfanatic and hootz for the suggestions... Much appreciated!

Links are broken, no one can go back there or are not permanently damaged and unlikely to be fixed again, you should immediately make a new link,,