It doesn't appear that there is a way to filter dead links from appearing in the HOP ADS. I'm testing several niches and this is pretty disappointing.
I do wish there was a easy way to find the bad hoplinks or dead links on our websites. I removed one just the other day and don't know how long the website was gone. It's a good thing i was not running a PPC campain still. I'd be tossing money away for nothing. lol I used the hoplink builder on one page on a site of mine and i'm guessing some of the ads that show have dead hoplinks and i don't even know about it. This can be a lost money if the right person clicked the ad and purchased. CB needs to find a way to scan there database for bad hoplinks and put them on hold till the vendor verifies that the site is back up.
I've recently started using the hopfeeds.com option for serving Clickbank ads that look like AdSense ads (see http://www.warcraft-world.co.uk/) and I've noticed during testing the odd hoplink that goes to domains that are no longer even registered let alone still running the Clickbank product they link to! Especially true with high niche keywords. You'd think Clickbank would clean up it's hoplink system, maybe do what some other ad networks use when an ad goes dead it no longer links to the site it used to go to. I was promoting the Ashlings Warhammer Leveling guide which has gone now and my traffic was going to another site which made me nothing (at least 1,000 hops before I realised!). Same for the World of Warcraft Leveling guide by Brian Kopps, redirected to another site presumably making Brian Kopps money (again over 1,000 hops!)! It should be easy for Clickbank to remove products that don't convert for X number of hoplinks (say 3,000 over the entire network) and add a new option for publishers to redirect the lost traffic to a URL of their choice. At least we wouldn't loose our traffic then and have unscrupulous Clickbank publishers make money from us for nothing in return! I've found it helpful to use a redirect script so all my hoplinks goes through an easy to access and change system, when a Clickbank product goes dead it's much easier to change all the links then to a related product until I get around to changing the pages with the hop links on. We shouldn't have to do stuff like this though, Clickbank should be far more active in cleaning out dead products and protecting our hard earned traffic. David