JNofollow FAQ

Yes – JNofollow is completely free and open source under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2 or later). No license keys, no registration, no paid tiers – and the code is open for anyone to inspect.

No – the plugin is built for Joomla 4 and Joomla 5 only. Joomla 3 reached its end of life and no longer receives security updates; if you still run it, upgrading the site is the right move – JNofollow will be ready on the other side.

No – there are no hidden backlinks to SEO NW or any other site, and there never will be. Hidden links are a manipulative practice that can get your site penalized; as a white-hat SEO agency we consider them off the table. The source code is open – you are welcome to verify.

You decide via the strategy option: “Keep” preserves existing rel values and adds the missing ones (a link with rel=“ugc” becomes rel=“ugc nofollow noopener noreferrer”), “Overwrite” replaces the attribute entirely with your configured set. Keep is the gentle default for grown sites; Overwrite creates uniform conditions.

Three per-link bypasses (each optional in the settings): give the link a chosen CSS class such as class=“follow”, set data-follow=“1”, or rely on existing rel tokens – a link that already carries noopener, noreferrer, ugc or sponsored (without nofollow) stays follow. One caveat: the blacklist always wins over every bypass.

The whitelist declares domains as friends: links to them are treated like internal links and stay follow – subdomains are covered automatically. The blacklist is the opposite pole: those domains always get rel=“nofollow”, overriding every bypass rule. Whitelist for partners you vouch for, blacklist for domains you never want to endorse.

No – internal links are never modified. JNofollow only processes links whose target lies outside your own domain; whitelisted domains are treated as internal on top. Your site's internal link graph – the SEO backbone – stays exactly as you built it.

They solve different problems. nofollow is an SEO hint to search engines; noopener closes a real security hole (pages opened via target=“_blank” can otherwise script against your tab – reverse tabnabbing), and noreferrer additionally suppresses the referrer. That is why the plugin's defaults combine all three – security is not optional.

No. The plugin processes article HTML once during content preparation on the server – no JavaScript, no external requests, nothing loaded in the visitor's browser. With Joomla's page cache active the processed result is cached like any other content.

Honest answer: it depends on the site. For comment sections, user-generated content, link lists and directories, consistent nofollow protects you from endorsing spam. For editorial content, hand-picked follow links to strong sources are a quality signal – which is exactly why JNofollow ships whitelist, bypass rules and article switches: enforce the safe default, keep deliberate exceptions. Note that search engines treat nofollow as a hint, not a command.

Via the built-in Joomla Update System: JNofollow ships an update server, so new versions appear directly under System → Update → Extensions – one click, settings preserved. Alternatively install the current ZIP over the existing version. If no update shows, rebuild the update sites (System → Update → Update Sites → Rebuild) and clear the update cache.