A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a URL that no longer works — it returns a 404 (not found), a server error, a timeout, or a redirect to an unrelated page.
Definition
A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a URL that no longer works — it returns a 404 (not found), a server error, a timeout, or a redirect to an unrelated page. Broken links can be internal (pointing to another page on the same site) or external (pointing to another domain).
They degrade user experience by leading visitors to dead ends, and they waste crawl budget when a search engine repeatedly fetches URLs that error.
Internal broken links are the more damaging kind for SEO because they interrupt the flow of link signal and crawl paths within the site. A broken internal link means a page that should have received a link, and a discovery path, gets neither.
External broken links matter less for ranking but still harm user experience and, in aggregate, make a site look poorly maintained.
In context
iGaming affiliate sites accumulate broken links from predictable causes: operators shutting down or rebranding (so review and comparison links point at dead brands), URL structure changes during a redesign that are not fully redirected, deleted pages that were still linked from elsewhere, and external citations to regulator or operator pages that move. Because these sites are large and change often, broken links are a continuous maintenance problem rather than a one-time cleanup.
The practical process is a periodic crawl of the whole site with a link checker, triaging the results: fix or redirect internal broken links (point them at the correct current page, or a relevant alternative, or remove them if the target is genuinely gone), update or remove broken external links, and set up proper redirects for any URLs the site itself has retired. Monitoring the search console's crawl-error and 404 reports catches new breakage between full audits.
Left unmanaged, broken links slowly erode both the internal-linking structure and the perceived quality of the site.
Worked example
An affiliate's quarterly crawl finds 340 internal links pointing at review pages for operators that have since closed, plus 90 links to a regulator's old URL structure. It redirects the closed-operator reviews to a "this operator has closed" note with alternatives, and bulk-updates the regulator links, recovering the internal-link signal those pages were leaking.
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