Syndicated content with meta robots 'noindex, nofollow': safe?

[Fabio80]

Hello,

I manage, with a dedicated team, the development of a big news portal, with thousands of unique articles.

To expand our audiences, we syndicate content to a number of partner websites. They can publish some of our articles, as long as (1) they put a rel=canonical in their duplicated article, pointing to our original article OR (2) they put a meta robots 'noindex, follow' in their duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article.

A new prospect, to partner with with us, wants to follow a different path: republish the articles with a meta robots 'noindex, nofollow' in each duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. This is because he doesn't want to pass pagerank/link authority to our website (as it is not explicitly included in the contract).

In terms of visibility we'd have some advantages with this partnership (even without link authority to our site) so I would accept.

My question is: considering that the partner website is much authoritative than ours, could this approach damage in some way the ranking of our articles?

I know that the duplicated articles published on the partner website wouldn't be indexed (because of the meta robots noindex, nofollow). But Google crawler could still reach them. And, since they have no rel=canonical and the link to our original article wouldn't be followed, I don't know if this may cause confusion about the original source of the articles.

In your opinion, is this approach safe from an SEO point of view? Do we have to take some measures to protect our content?

Hope I explained myself well, any help would be very appreciated,

Thank you,
Fab

[Fabio80]

Hello, can someone offer me some hint about this?

Sorry to bump the thread, it is very important and it would be very appreciated!

Thank you,
Fab