Playbook: Find and fix every dead affiliate link in one afternoon

Playbook: Find and fix every dead affiliate link in one afternoon

Dead merchant links bleed revenue silently. A link manager's built-in checker only catches 404s, not the worse failures. Run this sweep quarterly.

— Crawl all outbound links (Screaming Frog, External tab) and export status codes. Flag 404, 410, AND 301 chains.
— The 301s are the trap: a merchant redirecting your tracked deep link to their homepage strips your sub-ID. You still rank, you just earn $0.
— Cross-check against your network dashboard: any link to a program with "paused" or "expired" status, even if it returns 200.
— Spot-check 10 links manually with the network's link tester to confirm the cookie still fires.
— Bulk-update via your cloaker's global link table, not post-by-post.

Gotcha: a link can return HTTP 200 and still be broken — the merchant kept the page but ended the affiliate program. Status code alone won't catch it; only the network dashboard will.

Bottom line: crawl for chains, cross-reference the network for dead programs, fix at the cloaker level. The 301-to-homepage links are where the money actually leaks.