Costa Bingo ban link building

Costa Bingo (costabingo.com) have made a strange move and banned their affiliates from link building. Their announcement basically says:

As of this date affiliates are not permitted to acquire any links for [Bingo Site] terms from third party sites for the purpose of deep linking to their own [Bingo Site] review and information pages. Any affiliate found to have broken this term from this day onward will have any affiliate commissions withheld. The brand owner has made this move in order to guarantee the quality of reader experience when a user searches for their branded terms in search engines.  source

I am amazed a company would be so short sited to do this.  Surely affiliates are going to write more positive content than someone without something to gain financially?  Who wouldn’t want 10 positive things in the serps for brand searches? Like Anthony Shapley says,  perhaps Costa Bingo should be concentrating on their own seo, instead of trying to artificially tamper with the search results.

How are Costabingo.com going to enforce and carry out this part:

Any affiliate found to have broken this term from this day onward will have any affiliate commissions withheld.

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I’ve been known to write a post that actually picked up a natural link   If I write about Costa Bingo on a gambling affiliate site, and someone happens to link to it without me actively trying to link build, can I kiss my commissions goodbye?

The whole point of writing high quality, engaging content is to get people to link to it naturally. So is this counted as “link building” in itself?  If it is, should I be deliberately writing content so bad that it won’t pick up any links?

The gambling market is a very competitive one – what next, are powerball going ban us from ranking for bingo bonus codes terms or even the irish lotto?

Then how are they going to differentiate someone building links from someone just trying to wreck a competitors payouts?  It would be extremely easy for me to build garbage links to a Costa Bingo affiliate. Google is sophisticated enough to simply ignore these links to prevent sabotage, how are Costabingo.com going to deal with this? I get the feeling they are going to be judge, jury and executioner and solely decide, then steal your commissions.

What do you think of Costa Bingos stance here? If you think its worth getting it out there what they are doing, a link to this article with a “Costa Bingo” or a “Costabingo.com” anchor would be much appreciated

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2 Responses to “Costa Bingo ban link building”

1. Jason says:

   September 20, 2010 at 3:55 pm

   Wow this is a pretty bold move for Costa bingo to make, It will be interesting to see how many sites follow.
2. Which Bingo says:

   March 10, 2011 at 2:49 pm

   What’s amazing is that Costa seem to have ignored a very real possibility here. It’s quite feasible that competing bingo portals could link to their opponents website using these terms, and thus have them banned by Costa. It’s not like Costa Bingo are going to know who actually built the link?