3rd Party hosted whitepapers — bad idea? Duplicate content?

[BlueLinkERP]

It is common the B2B world to have 3rd parties host your whitepapers for added exposure. Is this a bad practice from an SEO point of view?

Is the expectation that the 3rd parties use rel=canonical tags? I doubt most of them do . . .

[BlueLinkERP]

Thanks for the tip. However, isn't it a bad idea to have a bunch of sketchy sites linking to you that are scraping content? Aren't those the types of links we should be actively avoiding?

[RobMay]

When looking to promote your material through 3rd party sites, make sure to discuss the options of rel-can. Make sure they are OK with sourcing the original files location and URL. Usually they are OK with doing this, as it's in their best interest to do

On a sidebar: Also make sure to embed any links in the PDF, White paper, infographic, or articles etc, with absolute link practices (if pointing to information on your site) use the entire URL and not just a relative path from the file located on your site/server. Because scrapers like to just 'scrape' content and publish automatically to spam sites, without either you're or the 3rd party knowledge, those links they scrape will automatically point back to internal pages or information referred to in your white paper on your site, crediting you with the link, the value and of the source original content. I like to make sure this is always done to get any credit I can when these black hat scraper sites hit work and try to re-publish.