FAILURE MODE: Your top-ranking page is serving a dead code

FAILURE MODE: Your top-ranking page is serving a dead code
The classic deal-site death spiral: a code goes stale, but the page still ranks #1, still pulls clicks, and now every visitor hits a 'this code expired' wall at checkout. Merchants track that. We hear several networks now log redemption-attempt failure rates per publisher and quietly throttle commissions on sites with high invalid-code ratios.
The fix: Don't just mark codes expired — demote them. Pull dead codes out of the H1/title and the first screen, push a working sitewide or a 'last verified working' offer to the top within 24h of failure. A 'verified [date]' line that actually changes beats a static '50% OFF' that lies.
Why it matters: Google's helpful-content signals and merchant scorecards punish the same thing — stale codes that waste a user's click.