How to Find and Fix Broken Affiliate Links

To find broken affiliate links you need two passes, not one: a crawler for the obviously dead URLs, and a product-level check for every link that still returns a healthy response but no longer sells anything. Most broken affiliate links are not 404s. They are discontinued items, out of stock listings, and redirects that quietly dump your reader on a category page, which is why a standard link checker will hand you a clean report on an article full of dead earnings.

Here is the whole process: what actually counts as broken, how to inventory and test what you have, which ones to fix first, and how to make the next break announce itself instead of hiding for six months.

What “Broken” Means for an Affiliate Link

Start by widening the definition, because the technical one is too narrow to be useful. A link is broken, commercially speaking, whenever the click cannot earn.

That includes the obvious case of a removed listing returning 404. It also includes a product that is out of stock or unavailable, which returns a perfectly healthy page. It includes a discontinued item that now redirects to a category or search page, a link that lost its tracking tag along the way, and a link pointing at the wrong country’s storefront for the visitor clicking it. In every one of those cases the link works and the money does not. Untagged links are so common that we gave them their own write-up; the fix there is tagging at display time rather than trusting whoever pasted the URL.

Step 1: Build the Inventory

You cannot check what you have not listed. Affiliate links hide in more places than people expect: post and page content, comparison tables, sidebar widgets, reusable blocks, buttons, linked images, and old posts nobody has opened in two years.

If you use a link manager, export the list and you are done in a minute. If your links are raw merchant URLs scattered through your content, use a database search tool to find every instance of the merchant domain and export that instead. This is also the moment the case for routing clicks through your own site becomes obvious: when every affiliate link is one of your own URLs, the inventory maintains itself and one edit changes the destination everywhere.

Step 2: Crawl for the Obvious Breaks

Now run a crawler over your site to catch hard failures: 404s, server errors, and redirect chains that wander through three hops before landing somewhere unrelated. A desktop crawler or a hosted broken link checker will do this happily, and for a single suspicious URL our free redirect checker shows what it returns and where the chain actually ends.

Two cautions. First, large merchants often challenge or rate-limit crawlers, so a 403 or 429 in your report is not proof the link is dead, only that you were treated like a bot. Second, a 200 response is not proof it is alive, which is the entire subject of the next step. Google’s own documentation on status codes is a good reminder that a page returning 200 with nothing useful on it is a recognized failure mode, not an edge case.

Step 3: Check the Destinations a Crawler Cannot Judge

This is the pass almost everyone skips. For each product link, the question is not “did the page load” but “can a visitor buy this today”. On Amazon that means availability: an out of stock listing looks fine to a crawler and converts like a dead end, and what happens when your Amazon product goes out of stock traces the full chain from click to lost commission.

Doing this by hand works for thirty links and collapses at three hundred. The scalable version is monitoring that understands products rather than URLs: it checks each item on a schedule and flags the ones that are missing, unavailable, or replaced. That is precisely what DevDome Affiliate Manager watches for, alongside tagging and geo-routing, so the same system that publishes your links also tells you when one dies.

Step 4: Fix in Order of Money, Not Alphabetically

A list of two hundred broken links is demoralizing until you sort it. Rank by clicks over the last 30 days and work down: the top ten links usually carry more revenue than the remaining hundred and ninety combined, and fixing them first turns a long cleanup into a short one.

Before you trust that ranking, make sure the clicks are human. On one of our affiliate sites last month, humans made roughly 9,450 tracked clicks while bots fired another 4,070, so close to 3 in 10 raw click events were automated. Sort by a blended number and you will spend your afternoon repairing a link that only scrapers ever touched. Our WordPress bot protection guide covers how to keep those hits out of the count in the first place.

Step 5: Rescue the Click Instead of Deleting the Link

When a product is gone, you have three options and they are not equal. Best is a straight swap to an equivalent live product, which keeps the sentence around it true. Second best is sending the click to a filtered search or category page on the merchant, so the visitor still lands somewhere they can buy. Worst, and unfortunately the most common, is deleting the link and leaving a recommendation with nowhere to go.

The difference matters because of what a click is worth. A rescued click still opens the 24 hour cookie window and can earn on anything bought inside it; a click to a dead page earns nothing at all. Where the fix is a plain URL swap that applies sitewide, a redirect rule beats editing forty posts, and DevDome Redirect Manager keeps that rule from being served stale by a cache.

Step 6: Make the Next Break Find You

Everything above is a one-time cleanup, and one-time cleanups decay. Retail catalogs change every day, so the only version of this that survives a real content calendar is automatic: scheduled checks, an alert when a monitored product goes 404 or out of stock, and a dashboard that shows which links are earning while they are still alive.

Set that up and the job inverts. Instead of auditing your archive twice a year and finding six months of quiet losses, you get told about one broken link on the day it breaks, fix it in a minute, and keep the click. If you want to see what that costs, our plans and pricing are on one page.