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

[squishi]

Search for "meta refresh" on google. It's a simple meta tag that will redirect after some seconds.

[RedPoint]

I have installed this addon, has run maybe 2 weeks, but now dont run this
i have vb 3.8.4 - i uninstall it but i observe this topic, when this realy run

[cosy]

sry i dint read all the reply's on this thread
but whats the difference to this mod vbAnonymizer ( https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=184267)

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by 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?

There is a setting in admin to put your own site (internal links) or any other site in a whitelist to not be redirected.

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by cosy

sry i dint read all the reply's on this thread
but whats the difference to this mod vbAnonymizer ( https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=184267)

I believe their redirect doesn't have the intermediate bridge page which is absolutely crucial for link weight retention.

The redirect isn't what saves your weight, it is the intermediate page that sends most of it back through your site via your menu.

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by nomoreturn@hotm

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

There is an admin setting to turn on meta refresh for the redirect page, which accomplishes this. You turn it on, and provide the delay in seconds you wish.

[Oria]

The mod not works on 3.8.5

[cafeden]

The mod not works on 3.8.5

Me too

[ali7118]

i tried but not work..
thank you bro.

[ChopSuey]

If you we`re running 3.8.4 and upgraded to 3.8.5! Read the readme that is included lol.

Works fine

But with sub-domains its not working correctly, need to modify code!