AWE: Backlinks To Be De-Indexed

Just got an email with the announcement.

Quote:

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Dear Webmasters,

Over the past years the number of backlinks pointing to our websites has reached a critical amount. While we appreciate all your efforts made so far we must comply with recent changes adopted by search engines.

In order to avoid any restriction we will contact you whom we can find AWE links hidden behind grey and/or black hat SEO solutions and will ask for their removal. It is our intention not to simply de-index these toxic backlinks but to discuss any matter and see they are being removed.

This is not going to affect the tracking of clicks, sales, or any regular Affiliate work but it is even more important from now on to respect the Google webmaster guidelines when linking our properties.

Soon there will be an update about this in our Terms of Service as well.

Should you have any questions, please contact the AWE Support.

Best regards,

AWE Team

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I don't really get what they're saying or trying to do. They can't de-index things. Only Google can de-index (since it's their index). I think they're meaning disavow - but why would they need to consult with the linking site first? AFAIK disavowing the link doesn't harm the linking site. And if someone is doing seriously questionable stuff, then just terminate their account - do you really want someone like that as an affiliate? But the underlying question is exactly what constitutes a problem link and why would someone bother do do a black hat link to AWE?

But more generally the porn industry has a huge problem with spammy links. All affiliate links are "paid links" and should be put through a robots excluded jump script, but my guess is that 95+% of affiliates don't do that. So sponsors constantly have a huge number of low quality links to them. There are ways to make that situation better, but few sponsors bother.