I have a website that has around 1,000 broken links and around 250 pages of duplicate content. Which do you feel is better time spent... Removing the broken links or rewriting the duplicate content... Funnily enough Google brings about 10,000 visit and growing each month...
broken links! that's a way bigger problem a broken link is a lost visitor 250 pages of duplicate content on a large site is pretty insignificant, especially if the site is database driven
What if the broken links are all external additionally how will the search engines react to external broken links.
search engines don't like outbound broken links - its a sign that your site isn't well taken care of. its definitely worse than duplicate content - in fact, there is no duplicate content penalty: http://www.highrankings.com/no-dupe-content
You should focus on fix those broken links as soon as possible. Those pages will be defined as 404 error and it will downgrade your site trust for Google / Bing in a long run if you won't fix it soon. All those broken links are also make visitor annoying too. The duplicated content should be replaced, except you can find quality incoming links enough to got your domain authoritative status established. You should be vigilant, even Google does still send you a traffic for now but it doesn't mean you site and the duplicated content could live for that long.
Both of them are definitely not great, but I would agree that the broken links would be more important. I would work on changing them both if you really care about the rankings and traffic of this website.
You can handle broken links very easily if you are using some CMS ( wordpress, joomla ) for your website, You just need the right plugin to automate it. If it is not CMS then you can create a custom 404 page and avoid the 404 errors. some intellegence can make a 404 seo friendly. Content rewriting is time consuming so you can temporarily add noindex metatags on duplicate pages ( again there are plugins for that ) to deindex them and keep on turning each of them dofollow after you finish rewrite it. Regards Parul Sharma.