Glossary
Link rot
The gradual death of links you published: the program moved networks, the product page is gone, the domain lapsed or the short link was retired. For affiliates, a rotten link often still loads a page and simply stops paying.
Also called: broken links, dead links, broken affiliate links, link decay.
Most of the causes sit outside your control. Programs change networks, and old IDs mean nothing in the new one. Networks retire short links, as Awin did with ShareASale short links that had no clicks in the year before its migration. Merchants delete discontinued products, which kills deep links first. To a visitor each case looks different: an error, a homepage, a notice that the link is inactive.
That is why a checker that only looks for 404 errors misses the quiet cases. A useful check follows each redirect to the end and asks whether the final page is the right product and whether the network still counts the click, which on a large site means a paid tool or a script plus each network's reports. Links you cannot edit later, in videos, apps and other people's sites, should point to your own /go/ address from the start.
Related terms: Affiliate link, Deep link, Link cloaking, Affiliate network, Tracker.