Scribd embed links - bad idea?

[Jen_Floyd]

My client's site in question has a TON of outstanding, constantly updated, highly detailed articles.  The site owner also has a branded collection of nearly all of them on Scribd.  I guess I can live with that because dupe content isn't an issue and the pdfs there link back to the site and another domain of ours. Plus it gets a lot of eyeballs on our newish brand and content, and we can run reports on users.

BUT, we have Scribd social share buttons on each article on our site that (among other things) allows a user to grab a direct link to the content on Scribd or an embed link for their blog or whatever.

So, two questions really -

• Foremost, shouldn't we get rid of that embed option on our page?  I mean, isn't is stealing from our backlink potential?  I can't imagine juice would somehow pass back to us through a Scribd-located doc or embed but I haven't found info affirming or contradicting that.
• And secondly, isn't a Scribd collection a bit analogous to posting videos on YouTube and hoping your page will ultimately benefit from it via clickthroughs, etc?  At this year's MozCon I heard a strong argument against that.

Thanks -

[KaneJamison]

"Foremost, shouldn't we get rid of that embed option on our page? I mean, isn't is stealing from our backlink potential? I can't imagine juice would somehow pass back to us through a Scribd-located doc or embed but I haven't found info affirming or contradicting that."

Yes, I absolutely agree that you should remove these. I'd also look for embeds of their Scribd documents and do a little bit of link reclamation and see if you can get a link added to the original content. Can't hurt, right?

"And secondly, isn't a Scribd collection a bit analogous to posting videos on YouTube and hoping your page will ultimately benefit from it via clickthroughs, etc? At this year's MozCon I heard a strong argument against that."

You could go a few ways on this - I don't think it's causing a huge issue. I might name the Scribd document something different from their own blog post, to try and rank for different variations on the titles.