Recently, a major competitor of ours approached us about becoming partners to help build each others SEO and search engine rankings.

His site and our site basically have the same type of content, we are in the same industry, and in so many words....we have the same business. We have many many similar pages that seem to 'match up' between the two sites content wise.

His business has been around longer than ours and already appears in the top 10 results in google for the major keywords (which we are both optimizing for).

Here is what he proposed:

On every one of our pages (my site), we put a link to the respective page on his website. For example, he has a page about "Business Books" and so do we....so we would link to each other from these pages. He wants a link from every one of our pages...and he will give a link to us on all of his pages.

Anchor text:
He is proposing that the anchor text for these links should read "partner"

We have about 15,000 pages and he has about 100,000 pages.

It seems that this could help by giving us some deep links into our site, from another site that has relevant content. Each link that we get would have a different URL pointing to a different page on our site. However, we will also be giving him a ton of links, which point away from our site.

Does anyone have any comments, suggestions, questions, etc about this type of deal? How can this help? How can this hurt us? What suggestions do you have to make something like this work?

He is desparately asking for these links, contacting us everyday about this proposal. He says that other sites in our industry are doing this and seeing positive results.

I'm fairly knowledgable about SEO, however this is a bit out of my league and I'm unsure what to do.

1. Either he wants us to be partners and have both of us benefit.
- OR -
2. He wants to KILL our business.

Thanks in advance for your advice.