Cheese me. I was in the Linkshare interface the other night getting Allzine links for blog posting about on the Roamsters.com site. Thirty magazines were returned in the Travel & Leisure category. I grabbed about ten of them, creating ten draft posts with magazine pictures and titles and planned to write descriptions of them later.
Well, good thing I clicked on some of those links. More than half of them no longer exist in Allzine's product database. Really, when I searched the Travel & Leisure category within Allzines itself, only 9 magazines were returned, meaning that 21 TWENTY-ONE!!!! of the Linkshare links were no good.
Of the nine that WERE good, some of them had broken graphics.
Lesson to affiliates: Check the merchant's site first to see whether or not the product is still offered. It's a hassle, I know, but better than wasting your time putting up product links that don't work and thereby frustrating your visitors.
Suggestion to merchants: Kindly make sure your product links are up to date!