Asking for a link back to their blog is different than re-posting their content -- and there are SEO considerations for both.

A link is one of the most powerful signals Google uses to decide who is a credible source and who is not. The more links, the more credible you must be (so goes the thinking). So website owners are working hard to get a lot of links from a lot of sources. Google has not been shy about touting the benefits of both linking to others AND receiving links. There is issue with Site A linking to Site B, and Site B linking back to Site A. In general, if someone asks you link to them, they may promise to link back, but that link will disappear pretty quickly through automated management.

Sharing the same content is not going to do you any favors. Google is quick to recognize duplicate content and penalize the copy-cats. There are ways around that (with a rel=canonical element), but it is a little more technical than I think you're looking for, right now.

Copying other people's content is done, and sometimes the copier gets more traffic and success than the original poster. There is a good write up of how BuzzFeed does this here: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/science-behind-buzzfeeds-viral-content

In short, there are reasons to both link to another site and quote their content. For optimal performance, this is measured and balanced with your own content and links coming to you.

I hope this helps, if you have other questions or want more help. Send me a message or schedule a call.

All the best,
-Shaun

I avoid this.

If you cite someone's content, link to it naturally.

Avoid people asking to do things like link swaps.

Yes! Of course!
My name is Humberto Valle, I'm an MBA strategist and have been a Digital Marketer for about 10 years now. As an SEO expert with www.Unthink.Me I can tell you for sure that yes adding backlinks to another website, as long as is relevant, will add value to that site. This would be a first tier backlink, what they are trying to do is get their website/company indexed, by search engines like Google, for a certain industry or topic. So if you have a blog that's about financial planning and retirement, an insurance agent who sells the same might benefit from a set of keywords turned into links pointing to a page within their site that also talks about financial -something- and insurance. So that Google indexes it for that category. The more they get the more relevant they will get. The problem is that it almost adds no value to you - if anything depending on how its done it can be taken away - so the trick to this relationship is to have them add links to another page of yours, from one of their other pages. It has to be relevant and for a keyword set that they are not also trying to rank.

or for a second tier type of backlink - you can ask them to link to an article or third-party website that includes your link already. This is an indirect link strategy where someone points to a page that mentions you from there. If you are looking for more information, we have some pretty useful articles in our website regarding lead generation and search engine optimization http://blog.unthink.me/how-long-does-seo-take