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]

I wanted to let you know I found a small bug in the whitelist function, a new version will be uploaded soon.

[mindhunter77]

ok, so if we use this mod is it safe to remove all nofollows? I also use the nofollow attrib to stop the spidering of sorting links, things that could be considered dup content, should I still use that?

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by mindhunter77

ok, so if we use this mod is it safe to remove all nofollows? I also use the nofollow attrib to stop the spidering of sorting links, things that could be considered dup content, should I still use that?

I would remove it regardless of installing this link or not.

Google's change means it is never a good idea to use nofollow on an internal link. and I mean never.

Instead to control duplicate content use rel canonical

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html

vbulletin will hopefully include rel canonical for internal duplicate content management in a future update.

[mindhunter77]

ok thanks, =)

Do you think removing nofollow from external links is a good idea as well or will it make no difference..

[smirkley]

Originally Posted by aspen0

The redirect pages WILL be indexed by search engines, they have to be.

And the redirect links cannot be nofollowed, or you still lose the PageRank. That is what Google changed. Prior to this change using nofollow removed the links from the equation that figured how much weight would be given to each link. They changed it so the links are included, they just don't get delivery of their weight.

Let me try to explain as simply as possible.

Normally you would send all your weight to the external links, or, if they were nofollowed, the weight would simply be removed from circulation. In either case, you do not get to keep it.

By using this plugin instead of sending your weight to the abyss or to external sites, you're sending your weight to the redirect page.

The redirect page then sends most of your weight back through your site through your menu/header/footer. The small fraction that is left is all that ends up being lost.

Ok, I do understand now. After reading the links you provided, plus your explanation, it makes much more sense and I apologise for being a bit thick headed in this, but I have been focusing alot lately on improving my seo as of late, and the more I learn, the more I dont understand lol.

But yes, the point is to lose as little as possible points via the redirect link dilution.



I currently use the old mod posted earlier in this thread, to add nofollow only to external links in posts, etc.
Should that mod be removed in leu of your modification?,... left in to enhance functionality?... or doesnt matter?

edit to add - ( The bolded text in my quote in this post apparently answers my last question.)

Thanks again for your help and I appreciate sincerely your input and advice.

[aspen0]

Yes, remove it, and this answers mindhunter's question as well.

I just uploaded a new file with a new version that fixes the small bug in the whitelist. Just reinstall (allow overwrite) the new product.xml file, no other updates are needed.

[Alfa1]

On second thought: i decided to install this hack right away. Many thanks.

Since SE are guests anyway, why not make this dependant upon member groups? There seems no use of activating this functionality for anyone other than guests.

EDIT: since a link to your site is on the redirect page, this defeats the purpose of link weight retention.

Now the page rank is no longer flowing to content relevant sites, but leaking to your site. The link to your site is defined in the template EXTERNAL_LINK. Please change this.

When clicking on an external link, a member is logged out. Could you please resolve this?

[aspen0]

You mean show different content to search engines than you show to other guests Alfa1 for the purposes of SEO? That'd technically be cloaking Alfa1 and is against guidelines and while it is a minor offense and probably wouldn't result in a penalty or ban, it is not really that worth it.

I could see offering that as a toggle in a future release, allowing you to set that in admin, leaving the choice up to you. It is actually a fairly good idea for a toggle.

I have no idea why someone would become logged out, the external link does nothing with cookies. Perhaps it is a browser issue? No one else has reported that, perhaps that user's cookies got corrupted or overwritten randomly, just as they clicked the link.

As for the powered-by link. It doesn't defeat the purpose, a small amount of link weight does pass through it, very small, a couple percent. The link is how I hope to spread the word of this plugin. Not every webmaster visits vb.org, but as sites install this plugin they'll see the powered by link, click on it, and see the explanation for what the plugin does and how it works. Its in the template, I can't force you to keep it, but I'd rather you keep it. This plugin is free, with the powered link you're still saving an enormous amoung of the link weight you would be losing without this plugin. It seems a small price to pay, but it is on the honor system.

[mindhunter77]

Anyone try this on 3.7 ?

[aspen0]

yes, 3.7.2, it worked