Unfortunately, we never reached the scale where we could exercise product blacklisting, and even 50k products were difficult to vet manually. And I had written significant code to help seek and destroy affiliate feed data problems which helped a lot but still ate up a lot of time.
The major data hygiene issue was that the affiliate networks tried to pigeon hole every product into the same schema. I think this was largely due to their major users being non-technical and their feed format being CSV based (so people could manipulate it in Excel)--this was the only time in my life that I wished for an XML set up, one that had different schemas for different products (this is why Amazon was attractive, they do this, but it's still not 100%. While Amazon has a large product category tree, a lot stuff still ends up being pigeon holed, especially if it's a specialty product). The worst part was the "extra" fields that the vendor could use for anything, some used them for keywords, others for deeper hierarchical categorization. I think my favorite was the "category" fields which were chevron delimited phrases within a single CSV field.