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

[Alfa1]

Any help on this?

Originally Posted by Alfa1

This mod conflicts with Links and Download manager.
I am getting this weird error on various pages:

PHP Code:

Warning: parse_url(http://javascript:AL_get(this) [function.parse-url]: Unable to parse URL in [path]/global.php(400) : eval()'d code on line 301 


When I turn Two-Step links off, they dissappear.

Please add the option to disallow guest viewing for externalredirect.php

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by Alfa1

Any help on this?



Please add the option to disallow guest viewing for externalredirect.php

I'll see about the bug, sorry, been busy. But again, we can't guarantee it'll work with every other mod, we can do our best to try, but sometimes there are just conflicts.

Disallow guest viewing? The mod already includes an option to turn off redirects for logged in users. Are you saying you want it on for logged in users but NOT guests? Why? There would be absolutely no search engine benefit for doing that, so you might as well not use it at all.

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by squishi

There's an automatic redirect on the external link page.
You think google does not detect this?

The point is not to hide the external links, or to block them. Google's changes show that you only hurt yourself doing that.

The point is to bury them, and make sure they're outnumbered, so any loss of weight is minimal.

And that auto-redirect is an option you can leave on or off anyways.

[Charles_1]

Originally Posted by TWTCommish

The post cache should use the standard bb code parsing functions. Are you sure the settings are all set to "Yes" before the rebuilding?

If you mean settings in Admincp -> Help vBulletin Options -> Two-Step External Link Settings, then yes, I am sure.

And one more thing - this hack can not handle some URLs correctly (below is an example from forum based on phpBB3), after redirect appears page with error, becouse URL is cropped.

In post is:
http://www.website.com/forum/viewtop...t=500&start=50
...but this hack redirect page to this:
http://www.website.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3

[chris1979]

When I make the first change (in /includes/class_bbcode.php), it takes my whole site down. I just get a white page.

Perhaps this conflicts with vbseo or another mod?

[SamirDarji]

I want to use this just for external forum links, can I just skip the file edits and use it in the format like: example.com/forums/externalredirect.php?url=http://www.externalexample.com?

[pythonimp]

I tried it, did not work properly. When I would click a link it would say "Not allowed for phpredirect.php - 404 error" etc etc.

[SamirDarji]

Did you check permissions?

[animcentral]

what's the differ with Vbanonymizer ?

[nomoreturn]

Hello evry one installed works great but want to know how we can redirect url automaticllay after some time because i saw on some forum they have this thing after showing warrning message link redirect after some seconds without clicking on Continue to http://www.********.ca
------
WARNING: you are about to leave ***.com and proceed to an external address. This link was submitted by a user and we cannot guarantee the appropriateness of the content it contains.
Continue to http://www.********.ca