Value of lots of links from my site

I have to give them lots of links back

[graeme_p]

A site, of roughly comparable size to mine (fewer uniques, more page impressions) wants to give me lots (hundrends) of effective links (probably by copying lots of my content and putting canonical tags on it that point back to my site).

Is there a lot of extra value in this compared with a a few links from the same site?

Is it worth giving them back lots of links in order to get this?

[StoutFiles]

No, and no.

[graeme_p]

That is a fast and simple answer! I am talking to them tomorrow and might suggest that they hide their copy of my content with robots.txt instead, taking the whole page rank thing out of the equation.

[graeme_p]

Of course the question should have read "lots of links TO my site from a single site"

[buckworks]

I agree with StoutFiles: no, and no.

If they want to republish some of your content they should be giving you fully spiderable links wherever your content is used, and the deal should not include any obligation for you to link to them. Links in exchange for content is already a good value for them.

Remember that you'd be incurring a risk that they'd start outranking you for your own content.

Consider the pros and cons very carefully. What's the value for you in all of this?

[graeme_p]

They should not outrank me for the content, because they are putting canonical tags on it. Google says canonical is equivalent to a 301, and Bing has some sort of support for it, right?

I am also getting paid for the content, the links are an extra.

Actually my biggest worry about this is that it might look too artificial to Google.