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Two-Step External Links for Link Weight Retention Details »»
Two-Step External Links for Link Weight Retention
Version: 1.05, by aspen0 aspen0 is offline
Developer Last Online: Jun 2015 Show Printable Version Email this Page

Category: Miscellaneous Hacks - Version: 3.8.x Rating:
Released: 07-01-2009 Last Update: 01-25-2011 Installs: 52
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No support by the author.

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

Download Now

File Type: zip two-step-external-link.zip (4.7 KB, 242 views)

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  • This modification may not be copied, reproduced or published elsewhere without author's permission.

Comments
  #92  
Old 07-08-2009, 07:06 PM
AdamJ2 AdamJ2 is offline
 
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I applied the 1.03 update but it still kills all of my signature images regardless of they are local or external.

See attached for an example.
Attached Images
File Type: png Picture 1.png (7.0 KB, 0 views)
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  #93  
Old 07-08-2009, 07:10 PM
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TWTCommish TWTCommish is offline
 
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I've got a fix worked out for some of the signature images which I'll have up shortly, though turning off verification for signatures should certainly stop the problem in the meantime; I've tested both uploaded signature pictures and remotely-hosted IMG tags this way, and both show up fine when the signature setting is set to "No."
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  #94  
Old 07-08-2009, 07:11 PM
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TWTCommish TWTCommish is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alfa1 View Post
Links that have variables in them like this, result in an 'invalid url' error:
PHP Code:
viewresource.asp?resourceID=145 
Re-upload the latest externalredirect.php file; it has modified URL verification.
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  #95  
Old 07-08-2009, 07:19 PM
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TWTCommish TWTCommish is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamJ2 View Post
I applied the 1.03 update but it still kills all of my signature images regardless of they are local or external.

See attached for an example.
Hard to diagnose from afar (though let me know if turning off signature verification fixes the issue).

If you're comfortable with giving me temporary admin/FTP access via PM, I'd be glad to take a look.
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  #96  
Old 07-08-2009, 08:06 PM
AdamJ2 AdamJ2 is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TWTCommish View Post
Hard to diagnose from afar (though let me know if turning off signature verification fixes the issue).

If you're comfortable with giving me temporary admin/FTP access via PM, I'd be glad to take a look.
Unfortunately, even with signature verification turned off, the issue persists. I have to disable the product to prevent the error.

I'll send you a PM shortly, thank you.
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  #97  
Old 07-08-2009, 08:08 PM
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TWTCommish TWTCommish is offline
 
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Not at all! Sorry to hear about the issues; I'll do what I can to pinpoint them, and I'll look forward to the PM.
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  #98  
Old 07-08-2009, 10:06 PM
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Alfa1 Alfa1 is offline
 
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This mod conflicts with Links and Download manager.
I am getting this weird error on various pages:
PHP Code:
Warningparse_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.
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  #99  
Old 07-09-2009, 12:38 AM
ade5675 ade5675 is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ade5675 View Post
Thanks, I will look into it and fix it.
Everything works fine now. It was the file edit that was not improperly done.

Thanks aspen0 .... great mod

installed and nominated :up:
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  #100  
Old 07-11-2009, 04:51 PM
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TWTCommish TWTCommish is offline
 
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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. I'm looking into how best to work around this, but for those of you who allow both of these things and want to keep using the rest of the hack (for posts, comments, blogs, etc.), here's a quick fix:

Just update the "Remove external link on postbit signature" plugin in the "in the "postbit_display_start" hook location. Replace it with this:

Code:
global $vbulletin;
if ($vbulletin->options['external_verify_sigs'] && (strpos($this->cache['sig'][$this->post['userid']], 'http') !== false || strpos($this->post['signature'], 'http') !== false)) {
  $this->cache['sig'][$this->post['userid']] = $this->bbcode_parser->parse($this->post[signature]);
}
Set signature verification to "No" and your signature images should be left alone, and you can use the rest of the hack's functionality for the time being.
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  #101  
Old 07-11-2009, 05:50 PM
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Brandon Sheley Brandon Sheley is offline
 
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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
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