Broken links on bank and corporate websites

Bank and insurance marketing sites in the RU/CIS market are often 1C-Bitrix or a custom portal. International groups add Sitecore, AEM, Liferay. The stack changes. The dead PDF in the footer does not.

What to expect

• Public marketing vs logged-in cabinet. Do not crawl the cabinet. You will collect 302s to login and call them errors.
• Regional microsites (www, moscow., old.) still linked from a global footer after a rebrand.
• PDF / DOC “disclosures” moved to a new legal URL. The href in a 2019 news item did not.
• Currency / product calculators loaded from a second origin. A 403 from the widget is not a broken menu.
• Bitrix composite on the marketing site — same traps as the Bitrix article.
• Custom Java/.NET — same traps as custom sites: scan rendered HTML.

How to scan without being a pest

Banks have WAFs. Use the extension on pages you are allowed to test (your employer’s site, a public marketing page). Pause the crawl. A handful of requests per second is enough. If you get a sea of 403, stop; that is the WAF, not 404.

Highlighting matters here: the broken “tariff PDF” is a 12px footer link. A table-only popup will not show you which legal entity it belonged to.

How to fix

301 the old disclosure onto the new one (legal will want a paper trail). Remove regional hrefs when the microsite is gone. Do not 302 the whole bank onto /. Recheck after CDN purge.

You do not need a special “bank CMS.” You need the public HTML and a crawl that knows when to pause.