We sell a whole site (domain, etc) to partners that create content that is shown together at the main site. What we want to achieve is that the main site copy is the original, but the one that is indexed is the partners copy. We want to do it this way so the search results point to the partner sites but never to the main site while the main site gets all the credit for the links.
We are trying setting the main site article with a noindex, follow and a link to the partner article, and in the partner article we have a rel=canonical pointing to the main site article.
Are we correct or the noindex at the main site will break the canonical reference?