Would there be any SEO risk if I link to some website with a high domain authority in exchange for traffic?

Question

I have a website with a good domain authority (DA >70) and there's a website coming to me asking me to link to theirs, they have a good DA about 81.

Is there any risk for me to link to them?

They are not going to link back but they promise to send real traffic to me. They have more than 10,000,000 monthly visits so I might get a few thousand per month.

They are sending traffic to me via nofollow links. That is what they told me. They have much more traffic than us (Alexa ranked around 500)

Answer 1

Check Google quotes:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a "free" product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.

If Google detects this for your website, it could be banned for your website and as a result, your website will lose about 88% of your traffic - the volume of searches from Google. Do not do it.

Answer 2

First, this is a common approach with people trying to get more links to their website. They've read some outdated SEO article about how to build more links to their site.

I get these emails asking me to link to their content regularly. No one ever offers me a reciprocal link (a clear violation of Google's guidelines). But I have had people offer me money. That too is a clear violation of Google's guidelines. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/link-schemes

The few times I have responded to these emails about how it would benefit me, I never hear back from them.

But to answer your questions, there's little risk to you. Neither of the sites appear to be spammy based on their DA. Furthermore, Google appears to smart enough to ignore spammy links and not penalize for it. Additionally, linking to other domains doesn't necessarily reduce your site's rank. See Does using links to other pages dilute the linking page's link juice/page rank?

However, if they aren't going to link back to you, how would they send you traffic? Are they going to mention your company or your website anywhere? Or are you simply hoping that their having a lot of visitors (which is always a guess if you don't have access to their system), will somehow generate traffic to your site?