One of the advertising options that my site provides is paid content syndication. For a fee, we will republish articles from the advertiser's blog. We make sure to mark the article as sponsored and all of the links in the article as nofollow. We also point the canonical link back to the original article to avoid duplicate content issues from Google. Since we are pointing the canonical URL back to the original article, all of the link juice that my version would get is not going to the original article. This to me sounds very similar to selling links. Does anyone know if Google has an official position on this? Is this something that I should avoid? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
I have always read that as long you 'no follow' paid links, you are good. Here is more on that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en