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

[Saviour]

It's also opening internal links in a new window and I have http://glitchpc.com added to the Whitelist.

[Saviour]

Uninstalled...went back to using NuHit's mod...at least I know that's working as it should.

Thanks, anyway...for the help.

[saadessa]

thank you i will wait to see more tests
thank you

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by Saviour

It's also opening internal links in a new window and I have http://glitchpc.com added to the Whitelist.

So, you got it working?

The whitelist is wildcard based, just like VB's email or ip banning. If you add http://glitchpc.com and the link is to http://www.glitchpc.com it will not match.

I suggest adding to your whitelist as just "glitchpc.com"

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by Saviour

Uninstalled...went back to using NuHit's mod...at least I know that's working as it should.


Thanks, anyway...for the help.

If you mean this mod:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=145402

It hurts you, technically.

[Saviour]

Originally Posted by aspen0

So, you got it working?

The whitelist is wildcard based, just like VB's email or ip banning. If you add http://glitchpc.com and the link is to http://www.glitchpc.com it will not match.

I suggest adding to your whitelist as just "glitchpc.com"

When I first installed this mod...I uninstalled NuHit's mod first.

I followed the directions to install your mod. I used glitchpc.com and http://glitchpc.com in the whitelist and neither worked. By the way...my site is configured as http://glitchpc.com...without the "www". Even rebuilt the post cache. Still could not get your mod to work.

Also read your blog and the latest info from Google regarding "nofollow". I do not use no follow...so I can't see where using NuHit's mod is technically hurting my site.

The only difference, I can see, between these two mods is that NuHit's is working for me...and yours is not.

So...sorry to say...I have to use something that works...

Good luck with your mod...

[Smitty]

Originally Posted by Saviour

Also read your blog and the latest info from Google regarding "nofollow". I do not use no follow...so I can't see where using NuHit's mod is technically hurting my site.

Doesn't the NuHit mod put in "rel=nofollow" tags? If you are you *are* using the "rel=nofollow".

As I understand it "rel=nofollow" is not looked at any more so one might as well not use them. If I'm not understanding this, please let me know.

I've never worry about outbound links because the moderators and I monitor them closely, but this mod sounds interesting. I'm always interested in vB forum SEO.

[Saviour]

Smitty...

NuHit's mod settings will allow you to turn "rel=nofollow" links on/off.

[Smitty]

Thanks for the info. I hadn't really looked at that NuHit mod. Probably because I bought the Mediawiki integration mod (which is still working on vB 3.8.3, but with an old version of Mediawiki) and the NuHit guy disappeared. I should have looked at that mod closer.

On the other hand, in my forums we monitor all external links very closely so we're not too worried about external links to 'bad neighborhoods'.

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by Saviour

Smitty...

NuHit's mod settings will allow you to turn "rel=nofollow" links on/off.

On or off, you'll lose linkweight either way. That was the change, used to be using nofollow would save linkweight, now it doesn't. It used to mean you kept the weight, and the linkee didn't get any. Now it means you lose the weight, but the linkee still doesn't get any.

I've a question for you though, if you couldn't get it installed, how is it you noticed the whitelist not working? If links were being redirected, it was obviously installed. This is where you confuse me.