Last Updated on September 21, 2023 by Christopher G Mendla
I came across a Joomla 2.5 site that had nofollow tags attached to every outgoing link. When nofollow was first available, there was a thought that all outgoing links should be tagged with a nofollow so that “page rank didn’t bleed”. However, it seems that doing so may make Google believe your site is spammy.
Most people only use nofollow in cases of questionable sites or sites where you are being paid to link to the site. In both cases, a nofollow is strongly suggested.
I downloaded and installed Marco’s Nofollow which is non commercial (But open to donations). The site is http://www.mmleoni.net/nofollow-plugin-for-joomla . The configuration is simple. I set the app to strip the nofollow tag and leave the target tag as is. This worked for this particular site since there were no outgoing paid links. If you have outgoing links or suspected spam links, then this extension probably would not work for you.
The extension works as a plug in. It does not go through and change all of the links. Rather, it effects the change only when it is enabled.
It appears that I will have to find a search and replace tool to go through all of the articles or I will have to manually remove the nofollow links in all of the articles. However, Marco’s Nofollow has changed the site so that the nofollow tag is no longer in the links giving me time to find a better solution.
Update 8 25 2012: – See my other post about using a search and replace product. I found one called DB Replacer which worked well.See our review of DB Replacer here.
UPDATE – December 2019 – It seems that the current best practice is to NOT apply no follows to all of your links.