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

[Saviour]

Are we to upload the externalredirect.php file? You didn't specify this in your instructions.

If so, to where...the forum root?

[Saviour]

I have this installed...yet I'm not receiving the redirect message when going to an external link.

[aspen0]

Yes, upload externalredirect.php to the forumroot.

Enable the plugin in Vboptions - > vboptions all the way at the bottom.

[Saviour]

There is no option to enable the plugin in Vboptions - > vboptions.

[mindhunter77]

set the buttons to yes,

I have nofollow set to no, then the rest to yes

[Saviour]

I do not currently have this marked as installed...since I can't get it to work.

I have made the file edits as posted in your readme file.
I have uploaded the externalredirect.php file to the forum root.
I have installed the product.
I found your product in vBoptions and have the following settings:

• Use no follow attribute is set to "no"
• All other settings are set to "yes"

I'm not getting any redirect message at all.

[mindhunter77]

I had this same issue, I eventually got it working by rebuilding post cache.

[aspen0]

If posts and things are cached then you would need to rebuild the caches for the edits to take place.

[Saviour]

I just rebuilt the post cache...guess what?

It's still not working...

[mindhunter77]

not sure then, wait for the mod author to respond I guess,.