Amazon Associates
A missing ?tag= is the most expensive affiliate failure precisely because it isn't a failure by any technical measure. The click lands, the product page loads, the customer buys. Amazon just has no idea it was you. Every link checker you own will call that link healthy.
Check my links freeFree · no signup · about a minute · checks the final URL, not the first hop.
How it happens
Tags disappear as a side effect of ordinary maintenance. That's why the damage tends to be broad rather than isolated — one change can strip hundreds of links at once.
Outbound-link handling changes, query strings get normalised, and every affiliate URL on the site loses its parameters in one deploy.
Some shorteners forward to the base product URL and discard everything after the question mark. The short link still resolves — untagged.
A URL grabbed from an earlier post, a draft, or the browser bar instead of the Associates toolbar. It predates your tag.
Check it yourself
Use incognito so your own cookies and any logged-in Amazon session don't confuse what you see.
Wait until the address bar stops changing. Short links and cloaked links can hop several times before settling.
Look for tag=yourid-20 in what's actually in the bar. If it isn't there, that click earns you nothing.
The scale problem
Two minutes per link is fine for five links. For three years of posts or two hundred video descriptions it's a weekend, and it's a weekend you'd have to repeat every time you update a theme. Residuals does the same check across everything you've published, follows each redirect chain to its end, and prices each untagged link with a disclosed estimate so you know which to fix first.
Find my untagged linksFree scan, no signup. Daily re-checks are $8/mo if you want to know the next time it happens.
Free check
A stripped tag shows up as a quiet shortfall on a statement — usually months after it started.
Run my free audit