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

[lebmedia]

does it work on vbulletin 4.0.x or 4.0.8 if not how can i make it work please

[aspen0]

I don't know of anyone who has tried it on 4.0, I may try it soon.

Small xss issue fixed today, new code uploaded. If you want, all you need to fix the error is upload the new externalredirect.php

[develop_827]

Originally Posted by aspen0

I don't know of anyone who has tried it on 4.0, I may try it soon.

And what results? Does it work on 4.x?

[BirdOPrey5]

Originally Posted by develop_827

And what results? Does it work on 4.x?

This mod will not work on 4.x.

It also looks like it will kill VigLink or Skimlinks or similar services if any forums are using them. They depend on direct external links.

[develop_827]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

This mod will not work on 4.x.

It also looks like it will kill VigLink or Skimlinks or similar services if any forums are using them. They depend on direct external links.

I ported this mode to vb4 (4.1.4).
Someday I will create a complete public package, I hope )))

P.S. Skimlinks may not work - I don't use it.
Remember that you can add some domains to white-list or create simple login in externalredirect.php to make necessary 302 redirect instead of showing second-step page..

[Jay106n]

I installed this on 3.8.4, I'm not sure if it is working or not. When I click an external link I get a white page for a moment and then it goes directly to the destination without giving the redirect message. I rebuilt the cache after the edits and installing.
in vboptions i selected yes for all the options.

[indiawilds]

Hi,

I installed this on 3.8.7. It is working fien with external links. I have added my domain in the whitelist. But still any internal links are been shown as nofollow. They are not redirected but they are nofollow.

What can be done? Please help.

Thanks.

[Louva-Deus]

Had to remove this because of spammer sites abusing it. They send requests to the externalredirect.php file with their own urls. Now I have a lot of unwanted traffic to my site. Many of the referrers claim to be Google bots. Just felt like posting this so others can be aware of it. Spammers take advantage of redirect scripts to boost their page rankings and to score free traffic to their sites.

[SamirDarji]

Interesting. How did you discover this?

[Jack_B]

Had the same problem. I discovered it after a server change and reviewing the traffic log. MANY request went straight to the redirect file with different URLs.

I did put an htaccess rule in place to deny direct access to the file. However, for Google not getting massive 403 errors, I did put the file into robots.txt for denial too.

Still using the plugin with this configuration without any problems now.