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]

Nothing in this hack causes links to open in a new window, save for the one on the EXTERNAL_LINK template, which I believe has already been updated, and is easily modified. But it doesn't cause any of the links in signatures, posts, visitor comments, or anything else, to open in a new window/tab. That is vB's default behavior when parsing links in posts, etc.

Regarding differences between this hack and the other: I'm not familiar with the other one, so I couldn't tell you, but I notice you're asking for differences other than the redirect page. The redirect page may be the only major difference, but as aspen0 has explained, it's the entire point. I won't repeat his descriptions of how link weight is distributed, as they're still there for anyone to see and he explains it better than I can, but it bears mentioning.

I'd be glad to help you debug this hack if you'd like to contact me privately and give me some level of access. Suffice to say this has been tested on several different versions and the code itself is pretty straightforward, so I should be able to determine rather quickly if perhaps something went wrong during installation, or if some other mod is in conflict.

I am still somewhat curious about your reference to the whitelist, though. The whitelist exists to stop links from being run through the redirection page. Are you saying you added your URL to the whitelist even though this wasn't happening?

[Saviour]

TWTCommish...

I appreciate the offer...and hope my posting hasn't had an ill affect on others who may want to download it. However, I've just decided to stay with what I have.

If I do change my mind...I'll be back to ask for assistance. Thanks, again, for your offer to help.

All my best...

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by Saviour

Okay guys...

I'll try to describe the problem again...hopefully, this time, I won't lose you.

When your mod is installed...and a user clicks an external link, it's supposed to redirect them with a message that they are leaving the current site...correct? Your mod does not do this for me.

Your mod also opens internal links (from my site) in a new window or tab. I'm using Firefox 3.5. I included glitchpc.com in the whitelist. I had set "rel=nofollow" to off. All other settings were set to "yes".

Those are the issues I'm having with your mod. For the life of me, though, I don't see the difference between your mod and NuHit's mod. How is your mod any different than NuHit's...other than the fact there's supposed to be a redirect message that does not seem to be working for me...along with the fact that internal links are opened in a new window...which shouldn't be happening.

When I installed your mod...I made sure NuHit's mod was uninstalled, first. I tried several times to get your mod to work, but was unsuccessful. It's not that I had given up...I just decided to return to the previous mod I was using that worked fine. The only reason I wanted to try your mod was due to the fact a message was supposed to be displayed notifying the person who clicks an external link that they are being redirected to another site.

Again...I gave this mod every opportunity and it failed on every attempt to get the redirect message to display or to prevent internal links from opening in a new window...even after rebuilding the post cache. If it matters...I'm running vb 3.8.3, vba CMPS 3.2.0 and vba Links Directory 3.2.0. I use quite a few mods...so...I'm not sure if any of them are conflicting with your mod...but that could be a possibility. However...like I said...NuHit's mod is working flawlessly.

Also...aspen0 stated this:



How? NuHit's mod gives you the ability to turn "rel=nofollow" on/off. It opens external links in a new window and you can choose whether to open internal links in the same (or a new) window. It also uses a whitelist. So tell me...how can using their mod technically have me at a disadvantage? Other than the fact if I'm using their mod, I'm not using yours.

Well...that's it...in a nutshell. I look forward to your replies.

Our mod has nothing to do with links being opened in a new window, as the other Chris said. VB by default opens user posted links, anything generated by bbcode, in a new window. In fact, in the post I'm quoting you quote me where I post a link to another vb.org page, go click on that link. Notice the new window. VB default behavior.

It sounds to me like Nuhit's mod is malfunctioning for you actually. If Nuhit's mod is supposed to allow you to stop internal links from opening in a new window, it is malfunctioning.

Now, how is it hurting you? Hurting is perhaps the wrong word to use. It isn't helping you. It isn't helping you a lick with Google. It is doing nothing for your Google rankings. That was my point, if that is not why you use it, if you use it to stop VB's default behavior of opening links in new windows, then I misunderstood. I thought you were using it with the idea to help your search engine rankings.

As for why our mod doesn't work, I'm guess it was either installed incorrectly, or there is a conflict with one of your other mods, like nuhit's not being uninstalled fully or something.

I don't know how many forums the other chris runs, I've got about 10, and at least 9 other people have installed it so far too, so that is a lot of variation, in which it works, your forum might just be an oddity.

[aspen0]

updated with bug fixes and a toggle to allow you to set to only show it to unregistered users. No file changes are needed, just reinstall the new xml file.

[smirkley]

Originally Posted by aspen0

..., I've got about 10, and at least 9 other people have installed it so far too, so that is a lot of variation, in which it works, ....

I know it is probably too soon to tell yet, but when you can, is it possible to provide some statistics based on your experience, of the net improvements that this mod has provided, based on actual data?

[aspen0]

Unfortunately that is very hard to do. Google purposefully obfusicates the link weight reporting they provide to webmasters, we never know the actual score, and as well they only always show data thats usually 4 months out of date.

[dont.net]

installed

Thanks

[NLP-er]

Installed and after link clicking on my forum I got:

1||1246761650||88.199.62.36||url=http://www.wp.pl||http://www.forum.simple-nlp.pl/informacje/887-kolejny-test.html||Opera/9.61 (Windows NT 5.1; U; pl) Presto/2.1.1Access Denied, you have been logged.

[NLP-er]

Also going to externalredirect.php without url param generates normal page with message about invalid url.

So this error exists only when url is set - I have white page whit that communicate and nothing else.

[aspen0]

I'm sorry NLP'er, I'm not understanding your issue.