How much do broken links hurt your rankings?

[jay88]

I know that broken links do negatively affect rankings a little, especially if they are making it hard for a spider to crawl. But has anyone noticed fixing every broken link actually noticably helping their rankings?

It am trying to do back-to-basics types of things as I wait for Jagger to end, and among them is going in and fixing old broken links.

Is it: "Oh my god, it will make a HUGE difference if you have no broken links in coparison to having hundereds of them"

or

"It may help somewhat but not really sure"

or

"It's nice to have a perfect clean site and make every page accessible to spiders and certainlky for visitors, but it doesn't make all that much of a difference at all"