You've bought a genuine copy of Artio Joomla SEF 3.4.2 and you can't get rid of the text that appears on the bottom of each and every page: "Joomla SEF URLs by Artio". Why do you want to do it? Well, perhaps you don't want to advertise someone else's prodct or services on your website? or perhaps you think that Google spiders will see this link, assume it is spam and mark down your site accordingly? or perhaps you think it does not look professional to have an unrelated link on the page.

Perhaps you want to disguise the fact that the site is a Joomla site from botnets that are attacking your Joomla site - regardless of your reason for wanting to do so, the boys at Artio have spent a lot of time and money creating this JoomSEF product and their reason for placing the link on the page is to mark the product as being the unregistered, free version. They want some payback from you using their component for free. The advertising they get from each and every site that uses the component and displays that link is a small payment in return. Some organisations give their software out for free, that is the beauty of open source software. Artio are in that half-way house where you can obtain their software for free, you can analyse and change the code freely but you need to read their terms and conditions before you do so. By removing that text from the free version you may be doing something morally or legally 'wrong'.

There are reasons where you might want to legitimately remove it, perhaps you have paid for support are trying to upgrade to the commercial version of the product but you are getting no response from Artio's forum (response times even for paid queries are notoriously slow) Perhaps you have paid Artio but don't want to upgrade to a later version for a technical reason (later version has a bug or lacks a feature) so you are stuck withn an older version that you can't upgrade to the paid version... then you might want to make the changes to remove this inserted, unwanted text and may feel entirely justified in doing so.

I've written this article a few times for different versions of Artio JoomSEF and every now and then I regurgitate it as Artio change their method for placing the text on the screen. In the past they used various means to obfuscate the code but of late the string is in plain text. This makes it easier to remove.

So, down to the nitty-gritty. To remove the that appears on the bottom of each and every page: "Joomla SEO powered by JoomSEF" you need to edit the file joomsef.php in your components/com_sef folder.

If your ftp tool has downloaded this file properly at about line 818 you will see the line:

        $buf.='<'.'d'.'i'.'v'.'>'.'<'.'a'.' '.'h'.'r'.'e'.'f'.'='.'"'.'h'.'t'.'t'.'p'.':'.'/'.'/'.'w'.'w'.'w'.'.'.'a'.'r'.'t'.'i'.'o'.'.'.'n'.'e'.'t'.'"'.' '.'s'.'t'.'y'.'l'.'e'.'='.'"'.'f'.'o'.'n'.'t'.'-'.'s'.'i'.'z'.'e'.':'.' '.'8'.'p'.'x'.';'.' '.'v'.'i'.'s'.'i'.'b'.'i'.'l'.'i'.'t'.'y'.':'.' '.'v'.'i'.'s'.'i'.'b'.'l'.'e'.';'.' '.'d'.'i'.'s'.'p'.'l'.'a'.'y'.':'.' '.'i'.'n'.'l'.'i'.'n'.'e'.';'.'"'.' '.'t'.'i'.'t'.'l'.'e'.'='.'"'.'W'.'e'.'b'.' '.'d'.'e'.'v'.'e'.'l'.'o'.'p'.'m'.'e'.'n'.'t'.','.' '.'J'.'o'.'o'.'m'.'l'.'a'.','.' '.'C'.'M'.'S'.','.' '.'C'.'R'.'M'.','.' '.'O'.'n'.'l'.'i'.'n'.'e'.' '.'s'.'h'.'o'.'p'.' '.'s'.'o'.'f'.'t'.'w'.'a'.'r'.'e'.','.' '.'d'.'a'.'t'.'a'.'b'.'a'.'s'.'e'.'s'.'"'.'>'.'J'.'o'.'o'.'m'.'l'.'a'.' '.'S'.'E'.'F'.' '.'U'.'R'.'L'.'s'.' '.'b'.'y'.' '.'A'.'r'.'t'.'i'.'o'.'<'.'/'.'a'.'>'.'<'.'/'.'d'.'i'.'v'.'>';

Simply replace this line with the following text:
      
$buf.="";

Make sure you back the original file up in advance so you can restore it in case your edits go awry.