Sometimes I write a post for another site and then post the first 1/3rd on my site to help promote it. Is this a bad idea?

[mcarroll]

Sometimes I write a post for another site and then post the first 1/3rd on my site to help promote it. Is this a bad idea? When I do that should I be adding a canonical link to the original post? Should I have /make sure the 3rd party site does something? Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks in advance.

[Chris.Menke]

Leaving it as is is fine, although you can also properly rel=canonical it to the full post on the other domain if you or the publishing site want you to.  I would probably do that.

Technically, it is considered duplicate content but google doesn't actually penalize for "duplicate" content per se. In cases such as yours, google just doesn't assign any ranking strength to the duplicate version--that is not the same as a penalty. So, if it is indexed first on the other site and/or that other site is a stronger site, or there is no  intent to make money through monetizing copied content, google will just assign the value for that content to that other site.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html :  We recommend the following best practices for using rel=canonical:

One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines.

• A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin…..” Google Webmaster Guidelines