Case study: monitoring caught 90 dead affiliate links bleeding $1,400/mo

Case study: monitoring caught 90 dead affiliate links bleeding $1,400/mo

A 5-year-old review site assumed its links worked. A crawl audit told a different story. They compared two crawlers for link-rot detection.

Sitebulb
Pros: one-time-ish desktop license, deep crawl, visual maps
Cons: manual runs, no live monitoring

ContentKing (live monitor)
Pros: 24/7 monitoring, instant alerts on new 404s
Cons: subscription, can flag cloaked-link false positives

Result: the first deep crawl found 90 affiliate links resolving to 404 or expired merchant pages — dead programs, sunset products, changed redirects. Those URLs still got ~12k clicks/mo earning nothing. Fixing them recovered an estimated $1,400/mo.

Gotcha nobody mentions: cloaked links (via a redirect plugin) often show 200 even when the destination is dead — the crawler sees your redirect, not the broken merchant page. They had to crawl final destinations, not the cloak.

My pick: Sitebulb for periodic deep audits; ContentKing if a day of dead links is real money.

Bottom line: old review sites silently leak commissions through dead links — crawl the destination, not the cloak.