FAILURE MODE: Deeplinks rotting to 404 across your whole catalog

FAILURE MODE: Deeplinks rotting to 404 across your whole catalog
Merchants restructure product URLs constantly — seasonal collections move, SKUs retire — and your beautifully deeplinked 'get this deal' buttons silently start 404ing or bouncing to a generic homepage that kills conversion. Nobody checks until revenue droops.
The fix: Run a monthly automated crawl of every outbound affiliate link, flag non-200s and homepage-redirects, and queue them for remap. The networks publish updated feeds with current landing URLs — diff yours against theirs. We hear the better aggregators run this nightly.
Why it matters: A deeplink to a 404 doesn't just lose the sale — a homepage bounce often resets the cookie window and erases attribution on the customers who do buy anyway.