How To Have Content Syndicated Without Being Penalized?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  David Jones: I was just reading Neil Patel's latest post on Quicksprout where he talks about how having his content syndicated on Business Insider got his site KISSmetrics penalised by Google as a canonical tag was not used pointing back the the original source of the posts on his site.
  
  This made me concerned as several sites I work on have their content syndicated on another fairly prominent business site with no use of a canonical tag to point back to our page as the original source, in fact there is a canonical tag but it has their url used for that which surely makes it look like we are scraping the content from them? I have reached out to the site but they have said they are doing nothing wrong and there is no reason to worry, however they said they syndicate content the same way Business Insider do so I guess Im right to be concerned! ;
  
  What does everyone here think?
  
  This is Neil's post btw:
  
  http://www.quicksprout [dot] com/2014/07/23/7-content-marketing-lessons-learned-from-losing-225418-visitors-a-month/
• 
  Sukhpreet Kaur: You need to get canonical tags placed immediately else you will loose rankings too.