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

[aspen0]

Documentation

Briefly, why this plugin is needed.

PageRank, or link weight, flows throughout your site like water, going from page to page, post to post, thread to blog to post to memberprofile through links. It flows in circles in a closed system.

When external links are added the system opens up, and water leaves your system to these third party websites. You now have less water.

On a forum page with a thread with 25 posts there can easily be over a hundred external links from signatures or post bodies. If you also have 100 internal links you're losing half of your water on that thread page. If such a situation is typical for your forum you're more or less losing half of your water for your entire site. Which means, simplistically, that if you implemented this plugin you could almost double your water (through conservation). That can have a large affect on both rankings and the depth to which Google will crawl your site.

The above is a simplistic explanation of a complicated process, but it should illustrate the drastic difference external link management can make. It is so important I believe vbulletin was officially going to code nofollow into 4.0, but now with nofollow not really helping you need something else, like this plugin.

Savings

The redirect page shows your forum template including header & footer for a reason. The amount of link weight this plugin will save your site is found by dividing 1 by the number of total links on the redirect page for a non-logged in user.

If you have 10 links on the page, 1/10 = 0.10. 10% is lost, you're saving 90% of what would have been lost without this plugin.
If you have 20 links on the page, 1/20 = 0.05. 5% is lost, you're saving 95% of what would have been lost without this plugin.
If you have 50 links on the page, 1/50 = 0.02. 2% is lost, you're saving 98% of what would have been lost without this plugin.

And again, if you merely use rel=nofollow on external links (like many sites have done before now) you're still losing that weight thanks to what Google recently changed as per their announcement in June 2009.

So, if you install this plugin and on a forum thread page you've got 50 internal links and 50 external links, you're losing 50% of the weight on that page to the redirect page from the plugin (the weight is split between all links). However, if you've got 50 links on the redirect page, the redirect page is then salvaging 98% of that 50% back to your site. So in the end you only lose 1% of the link weight that was present on the original thread page, and no matter how many users post, how many links they have in their signature, in such a situation it'll be impossible for you to ever lose more than 2% of the weight of that post. They could post a million links and you wouldn't lose more than 2% of your weight. That is the beauty of the system.

The other beauty is that because there are valid reasons to do this anyways, irregardless of search engines, someone would be hard pressed to describe this as anything but white hat seo. As opposed to cloaking or otherwise hiding your external links.

Install

Do the file edits described in the readme file.
Upload externalredirect.php to your forum root directory.
Install the plugin xml file using VB's plugin manager.
Visit vBulletin Options ==> vBulletin Options and scroll to the bottom of the global option list to turn on the plugin and edit settings.

nofollow settings
The nofollow setting in the admin is to set whether or not the external link on the redirect page will use nofollow. This is recommended to be on. This does not set nofollow to be applied to the external links where they are first visible on your post pages and within signatures, this is to be avoided as it can hurt you which is why this hack exists.

Whitelist Settings

To be safe you should add your domain to the whitelist after install.

The whitelist is a wildcard search just like VB's built in IP and EMAIL based banning.

Entering www.example.com in your whitelist would match "www.example.com" but not "example.com"

So, to add an entire domain to the whitelist, it is best to keep it in the format of "example.com" which will match to "www.example.com" and "example.com" and "blog.example.com" and any other such domains.

Caching

After installing you may need to reload various caches to get the redirects to show up, to test try making a new post that would not have yet been cached.

[TWTCommish]

Reserved here, too. This was aspen's idea and he asked me to develop it, so I thought it might be worth reserving a second post, in case I happen to come across any questions or common issues which I can answer. Enjoy the hack!

[Sweeks]

Do VBSeo users need this?

[aspen0]

I don't support or use VBseo (there are reasons), but Google made this announcement within the past month so I find it unlikely they have implemented anything like this.

If VBseo currently assigns nofollow to user signatures and other user contributed links, then yes, this would be an improvement. If VBseo currently does nothing to such links, then yes this would be an improvement. The only way this won't be an improvement really is if VBseo currently does this exact thing.

In fact, VBseo may be hurting you. Doing some Googling it looks like VBseo may be using rel=nofollow to block even some internal site navigation, such as to printthread.php, this will result in that link weight being lost now, not retained as it was until recently. The proper solution is to use the new canonical link element to define the canonical URL for the same content source (ie, showthread.php for all printthread.php locations). Ever since the announcement webmasters have been scrambling to remove nofollow from any and all internal links that had it, it can only hurt you to use it in that fashion now.

[TimberFloorAu]

Sounds very plausible.

I would like more information please, on the different link types you mention. I must confess I have never really understood the different link terms.

My expertise ends at "_new" and "_blank"

Could you explain more, and provide some example of a typical setup, to increase our "water retention" as you imply.

Regards Ste

[Alfa1]

Thank you. Tagged for installation after vb4 comes out. I hope you will upgrade this to be compatible with vb4.

[kkingg]

thanks but I cant installed

[kawe]

isnt work for me
already follow readme.txt

[relaxiha]

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