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?
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 
