Last Updated on September 21, 2023 by Christopher G Mendla
In a previous post, I had mentioned that I needed to remove the rel=nofollow tag from a number of articles on a site. With multiple links per article, the process would have been tedious at best. I used marco’s nofollow extension to provide a temporary fix. It removed the nofollow attribute from the resulting pages but did not actually remove it from the articles.
I found an extension called DB Replacer which did the trick. WARNING – this tool directly manipulates your data tables. One small mis-step and POOF, your site is toast.
The extension comes in a free and paid version. The free version is limited to 50 rows which worked for me, The paid version is 30 Euros per year and it appears that you can use that on multiple sites. The DB Replacer site is
http://www.nonumber.nl/extensions/dbreplacer#
Once the extension was installed, the process was simple. DB Replacer was listed under components (Joomla 2.5.x). You need to have a good idea of the table and column you want to work with. Since the links I wanted to change were in the CONTENT table, I chose that. I needed to run through the process twice, once for the INTROTEXT column and once for FULLTEXT (I could have used a control-click to select both but didn’t realize it at the time. I searched for rel=”nofollow” and replaced that with nothing. You get two warnings that you could toast your site. The result was that the nofollow attributes were completely removed from the site. (I had less than 50 articles so the free version worked. If I had more than 50 articles, I would have needed to purchase the paid version)
ONE FINAL WARNING – This tool works directly on your database. Back up first but realize that it could still break your site. ..