Miscellaneous Hacks - Two-Step External Links for Link Weight Retention

Two-Step External Links
Thought up by Chris Beasley, coded by Chris Bowyer, copyright Jalic Inc. 2009.

Compatibility
Tested on 3.7.x and 3.8.x, may work on older versions as well.

Description
With Google's recent change to nofollow calculations using nofollow on your user submitted external links will still harm your site by depriving your internal links of PageRank. (See here.)

Forums that had installed nofollow on signature or other such user contributed links thinking they were controlling this are in fact no longer doing so.

One solution is a two-step linking process presenting a disclaimer on a redirect page (filled
with your internal links) to mitigate link weight loss. For a full explanation of benefits and the math behind them see the official page (a wordpress plugin is also available there).

Two-Step External Linking

This method is also useful for sites needing a disclaimer before sending people to third party user contributed websites for legal or liability reasons.

Using this plugin can reduce the amount of pagerank sent through user contributed signature and other links by over 90%, for every post or thread on your forum. It also allows you to keep using nofollow to indicate to search engines that if the link is to a bad neighborhood you are not at fault, while not wasting link weight on the nofollow link.

Settings
The settings are located in vBulletin Options -> vBulletin Options -> All the way at the bottom. You can do the following:

1. Create a white list of domains or urls exempt from redirecting.
2. Decide to apply "nofollow" to the external link that shows on the redirect page or not.
3. Turn on two-step linking for signature links.
4. Turn on two-step linking for post/profile visitor message/blog links.
5. Turn on two-step linking for user profile/memberlist links.
6. Define your redirect warning disclaimer paragraph.
7. Decide to use an additional automated meta-redirect or not, and the second delay.


Statistics

New Files: 1
File Edits: 2
Products to Install: 1
Readme included

Additional Uses
Because the actual redirect page is fairly independent of vbulletin and easy to access, you can run any other external links from any software on your site through it simply with the format of example.com/forums/externalredirect.php?url=http://www.externalexample.com. So if you're able to edit your CMS or otherwise manually format your links as such, they will be run through the redirect as well.

Support

I'll do my best to provide support in this thread only for people who have it installed.

Version History

1.00 - Initial Release
1.01 - bug fixes
1.02 - bug fixes, added admin toggle to allow you to choose to only show redirects to guests.
1.03 - bug fixes
1.04 - bug fixes, non-www urls & sigpic problems fixed.
1.05 - Jan 25th 2011, small xss flaw fixed

[TWTCommish]

I'm not sure if you read aspen's initial posts, but they explain the SEO benefits. They also explain why adding nofollow tags to external links doesn't work the way it used to.

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by Loco.M

I've yet to see how this would help at all with SEO
It's no different that adding a nofollow tag to external links IMO
Has anyone installed this and done nothing else and has seen positive results from it?

regards

Please see here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

At least on Google for sure, nofollow no longer provides any SEO benefit. Zip zero zilch.

[dondavis]

Hello thank you for mod. But i cant make it work for me. I have done all file mods, put php file in forum root, installed product. But no effect . I have vbseo installed maybe that's the problem. Can you help me please with some advice?

[jawatkin]

Originally Posted by TWTCommish

Okay, to anyone having issues with images in signatures: it appears there's a conflict only when a user is using an upload signature picture and an externally-linked image at the same time.

The fix you posted does indeed work, but I only allow my users to use an upload signature and it happens to me, as well. It only happens on signatures that have an image that is linked. At least, as far as I can tell. This signature triggered the issue:

[URL="http://www.myforum.com/forum/album.php?albumid=3125&pictureid=31032"][SIGPIC][/SIGPIC][/URL]

Now, what I did find was that... in the user's profile, in the "About Me" section, it works perfectly. But in showthread, it just displays the sigpic tags. HTH.

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by dondavis

Hello thank you for mod. But i cant make it work for me. I have done all file mods, put php file in forum root, installed product. But no effect . I have vbseo installed maybe that's the problem. Can you help me please with some advice?

There may be a conflict with VBseo. You could have also done the file edits incorrectly. Please doublecheck your work, they can be confusing, for instance one edit needs to go just inside a closing } in a line of 3 } and it can be easy to misread it and put it after all three, instead of after just the first two.

[ade5675]

Originally Posted by Loco.M

I've yet to see how this would help at all with SEO
It's no different that adding a nofollow tag to external links IMO
Has anyone installed this and done nothing else and has seen positive results from it?

regards

Some sections on my forum are mostly driven by RSS feeds from other external sites so I have lots and lots of links to other sites. Trust me .. I am seeing a big positive difference in what the mod is doing already on my site. I had once used the rel="nofollow" anchor tag attribute without any value-added noticed so I say stay clear of it.

I am monitoring this mod on my site and will provide updates later. So far, it works well for me.

You can check for yourself > Naija Discussion Forum


:up: :up: :up:

[dondavis]

Originally Posted by aspen0

There may be a conflict with VBseo. You could have also done the file edits incorrectly. Please doublecheck your work, they can be confusing, for instance one edit needs to go just inside a closing } in a line of 3 } and it can be easy to misread it and put it after all three, instead of after just the first two.

Yeah thank you. It was my mistake in file edits.

[Stefanus]

Hi,
The following link gives a invalid url:
http://jv.news24.com/Beeld/Opinie/Ru...540963,00.html

This seems to be the case on all none www urls, any help on this?

Thanks

[aspen0]

if you've got it installed please mark it as such Stefanus.

I will look into that bug, should be an easy fix.

[TWTCommish]

Originally Posted by Stefanus

Hi,
The following link gives a invalid url:
http://jv.news24.com/Beeld/Opinie/Ru...540963,00.html

This seems to be the case on all none www urls, any help on this?

Thanks

Subdomains/non-www domains work fine; it's the commas that's causing the problem. I've modified the externalredirect.php file to allow for those, as well. Just uploaded the attached version over your existing one.