Definition
Broken link building is a link-acquisition tactic: find pages that link to a resource that no longer exists (a dead URL returning 404), create or already have a comparable working resource, and contact the linking site to suggest replacing the broken link with yours. The pitch is framed as a favour - you are helping them fix a broken link on their page - and the link is editorially placed if the site owner agrees the replacement is genuinely a good fit.
Done properly it is a white-hat tactic because the resulting link is editorially chosen and the replacement content genuinely serves the linking page's context. Done as a spam campaign - mass, irrelevant outreach, or pointing sites to thin content that does not really replace what was lost - it is low-value and low-yield, and it does not produce the kind of links that hold up.
In context
For an iGaming affiliate, broken link building is one of the safer link tactics in a niche where most link acquisition is risky, but the opportunity set is narrow. The realistic version targets genuinely relevant contexts: a gambling-research page, a responsible-gambling resource list, a journalism piece, or an industry article that links to a dead statistic, guide or tool, where the affiliate has a genuinely equivalent live resource (its own data study, a substantive guide, a glossary that covers what the dead link explained).
The outreach has to be honest and specific - here is the broken link on your page, here is a comparable resource - and it only works when the replacement really fits.
The cautions: it does not scale into mass outreach without becoming spam; the linking sites worth pursuing are editorially run and will only replace a link if the fit is real; and the affiliate's replacement content has to actually be good enough to belong on that page, which means the tactic rewards sites that have built substantive assets (original research, a real glossary, tested guides) rather than thin pages. It also overlaps with link reclamation (recovering lost links to your own content) and digital PR.
For a large glossary, broken link building has a specific angle: pages that linked to a now-dead glossary or definition elsewhere are candidates to point at the corresponding term on a comprehensive, maintained glossary instead.
Worked example
An affiliate finds a university responsible-gambling resource page linking to a defunct industry glossary. It emails the page owner noting the dead link and offering its own maintained glossary's relevant section as a replacement.
The owner checks it, agrees it fits, and swaps the link. The affiliate repeats this only where its resource genuinely matches, not as bulk outreach.
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
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