This is where some of the real power is and the plugin does everything for you.
It will use the powerful BALE™ engine and automatically check all your affiliate links to make sure that they are working as they are supposed to.
You can see a list of all the affiliate links managed by the plugin by going to:
Commission Harvest → Link checker
Since checking links can take up a lot of server power, the plugin is testing links in small batches of 10 links.
It will therefore take a little while when first installing the plugin. After the initial run through, the plugin will continue to check the links on an ongoing basis to make sure, that all links are working as they are meant to.
Cool Feature: Since almost all affiliate networks will have you link to them and then redirect to the merchant, the BALE™ engine within the plugin will test “several levels” of links/redirects. This is designed to make sure that if a merchant changes her site or cancels her affiliate program, you will get a warning that something is wrong. Normally you wouldn’t notice this as the affiliate network would just redirect you to one of their own pages instead of the merchant (bad user experience for your readers).
Each affiliate link can have 4 different status messages:
Green (200 – OK) = Means that everything is okay and working properly.
Orange (3xx – Found) = Means that the link is being redirected to somewhere else than originally planned and should therefore be checked manually
Red (4xx – Not found) = Means that there is something wrong with the link. Either is has an error or is no longer working for some other reason. Gives a bad user experience so should be fixed quickly
Red (Affiliate link error) = Means that the affiliate link is no longer sending the visitor to the intended root domain for the specific merchant
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