Are small scale local link exchanges bad?

I have a client I do social media for who runs a wedding business (top40 cover band). He's thinking of setting up a preferred vendors page and asking vendors/venues he's known over the years to do link exchanges with him (he puts a link on his vendors page to them and vice versa). I doubt it would ever reach more than 100-150 links max - but for a while it will be a small amount of links while he's building it up.

-the links are all with local vendors/venues (within CT)
-Everyone is in the event market, so they are in the same niche.

My understanding is that it would help everyone involved on two levels.
1. This is considered a "backlink" for both of people- Google loves these and one of the ways they measure your rank in the search engine is by the number of backlinks you have.



2. This will also give both a natural boost in web traffic, as I have perspective clients visiting my web site that may not have found a photographer yet, and you have perspective clients visiting yours that may not have found a band yet.



Now I've been researching and finding different things - some say 1:1 link exchanges are bad for SEO altogether, some say they are only bad if they are part of a generic large link exchange/link market/link network type thing.... I'm not sure what to believe.

What are your thoughts? If it's local and small scale like this, will it hurt my ranking or help me get traffic?

Thanks!

Well it isn't about the local scale. It is bad because google sees those kind of links as purchased links and as you may know Google isn't a fan of purchased links. I would definetly discourage your client to do that.

I personally can't see it being a problem! He could set up a vendors page on a different domain, but ask the venders to link back to his 'actual' wedding site, then he won't have any issues with the whole 1:1 ratio business he'll just have a ton of 1 way backlinks to his main site

If he puts more than 50 links on one page Mother G may penalize him for it in ranking and I also agree that Mother G may see this as a paid link and not like it. If you do this I would make sure that any link to you does not contain 'NoFollow' on it.

What's "nofollow"?

QParker said:

If he puts more than 50 links on one page Mother G may penalize him for it in ranking and I also agree that Mother G may see this as a paid link and not like it. If you do this I would make sure that any link to you does not contain 'NoFollow' on it.

Click to expand...

<a href="HisSite.com" rel="nofollow">His Site Name Here</a>

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

If you google links to other sites and find what google itself has to say, you will then learn..
some are bad, others are good. so get it from google itself

Alas, Google doesn't tell us whether local reciprocal links are ok, how many reciprocal links are too many, etc. All that we know is that Google's guidelines instruct us to avoid "excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")".

So if you have a diverse backlink profile, some reciprocal links (that come from relevant authoritative sites) are totally ok.
After all, some reciprocal linking can be natural.

But note that when you you abuse reciprocal link building, that may result in a penalty. So, don't get obsessed with this link acquisition technique, and you will be fine.

there are many views about links.
I guess you have to read up and decide for yourself.
Matt Cutts from google will tell you about it.
search google for "matt cutts AND google AND reciprocal links " (without the quotes) and see what he has to say.
i

150 links doesn't look like small scale to me.
Maybe if they have the 'nofollow' attribute, they will not attract any penalization.

yes you can make few link exchange for your site, but link must from home page or within post and avoid to sidebar linking

This is a very subjective question. If you have thousands of links, than yes, a few hundred reciprocal links would be okay. But if you have very little or no back links, then yes, it will appear that you are trying to game the system. Start with some local business directories first. These are great for local SEO and you can find quite a few of them.

zee007 said:

This is a very subjective question. If you have thousands of links, than yes, a few hundred reciprocal links would be okay. But if you have very little or no back links, then yes, it will appear that you are trying to game the system. Start with some local business directories first. These are great for local SEO and you can find quite a few of them.

Click to expand...

Yes you are absolutely right.

OP you gotta figure out how much links your client has, but anyways, if the links are for increasing rank, find some of the best blogs out there about the topic that your client is doing and try to get BL from those Blogs or Websites, the increase in rankings will be way better.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

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If the clients know anything about linking, they would notice the if you set it up as nofollow. I'd personally do the suggestion of having a separate domain to link to their sites.