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

[TWTCommish]

I didn't really follow how that would be possible, either. Either the mod didn't do anything, or it redirected all links and the whitelist didn't work. It can't be both.

Regardless, I'd be glad to take a look at the user's site, but he seems to have given up on it pretty quickly. If you change your mind, Saviour, I'm fairly certain we could find the problem.

[Alfa1]

Originally Posted by 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.

All vbulletin boards do this, because member groups have different permissions than others. Most boards restrict guests from posting or from various functionality. That's the nature of the permissions system.
Cloaking would be treating guests differently than SE bots.

Originally Posted by aspen0

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.

I am not sure either. I always have a fair amount of members online, so bugs tend to surface quickly.

After installing your hack, my members report the following issues:
- If a member has not listed a website in profile, then this dead link is displayed on profiles: http://www.mysite.com/forum/externalredirect.php?url=
I have about 40.000 of those dead links now.
- signature pictures that are on another site, no longer display.
- the link to a members home page from postbit dropdown does not work.

Please advise.

[TWTCommish]

The cloaking bit wasn't addressed to me, but restricting posting is a bit different than restricting content, since content is the issue here.

Anyway, I'm afraid I need some more information to debug these issues; a link to your site, for example, would help a great deal. Regarding these:

signature pictures that are on another site, no longer display.

Does this mean the images don't display, the images are broken, or the link is not directed?

the link to a members home page from postbit dropdown does not work.

How does it not work? Is it not redirected as it should be, redirected when it shouldn't, or does it something else? I can't see any of these things, obviously, so I need much more information in order to help debug these problems.

[TWTCommish]

Originally Posted by Alfa1

- If a member has not listed a website in profile, then this dead link is displayed on profiles: http://www.mysite.com/forum/externalredirect.php?url=

I'm PMIng you a small patch now. Looks like this is caused because vBulletin is parsing this field even when it's blank, or something similar. Odd, but easily fixed. Check your PMs in a minute.

[aspen0]

Does this mean the images don't display, the images are broken, or the link is not directed?

I think I know what is happening here, the image URL is being rewritten as a redirect as well, causing the image to fail and be broken. That would be my guess anyways.

[TWTCommish]

That was my guess, as well, but the only part of the script that adds the URL rewrite is the function which handles bbCode links, which shouldn't effect the image tag's URL.

[aspen0]

Yes, it'd be best to see the exact examples, or a snippet of view source from the page.

[Alfa1]

Originally Posted by TWTCommish

signature pictures that are on another site, no longer display.

Does this mean the images don't display, the images are broken, or the link is not directed?

Images displayed with the [SIGPIC] bbcode are not displayed. Here is the source:

PHP Code:

        <!-- sig -->
            <div>
                __________________<br />
                <div align="center">[nopparse][SIGPIC][/SIGPIC][/nopparse]</div>

            </div>
        <!-- / sig --> 


^ignore the noparse code please.

Originally Posted by aspen0

I think I know what is happening here, the image URL is being rewritten as a redirect as well, causing the image to fail and be broken. That would be my guess anyways.

Originally Posted by TWTCommish

That was my guess, as well, but the only part of the script that adds the URL rewrite is the function which handles bbCode links, which shouldn't effect the image tag's URL.

Please check if affects the [SIGPIC] bbcode.

Originally Posted by TWTCommish

the link to a members home page from postbit dropdown does not work.

How does it not work? Is it not redirected as it should be, redirected when it shouldn't, or does it something else?

Nothing happens when clicking the link. This is caused by this being added to the link:

PHP Code:

 rel= 


Now that i see it, I am not sure if this is related to this hack.

Originally Posted by TWTCommish

I'm PMIng you a small patch now. Looks like this is caused because vBulletin is parsing this field even when it's blank, or something similar. Odd, but easily fixed. Check your PMs in a minute.

Thank you. That works well.

[TWTCommish]

Glad that worked for you. We'll incorporate that change into the official release.

I've tried adding signature pictures to my test board without incident so far. I'll try a few more things and let you know if that helps me duplicate the problem.

I think you're correct about the homepage link and the rel= issue being related to another mod, as this particular hack doesn't add any rel attitributes, except in the EXTERNAL_LINK template.

[Saviour]

Originally Posted by TWTCommish

I didn't really follow how that would be possible, either. Either the mod didn't do anything, or it redirected all links and the whitelist didn't work. It can't be both.

Regardless, I'd be glad to take a look at the user's site, but he seems to have given up on it pretty quickly. If you change your mind, Saviour, I'm fairly certain we could find the problem.

Okay guys...

I'll try to describe the problem again...hopefully, this time, I won't lose you.

When your mod is installed...and a user clicks an external link, it's supposed to redirect them with a message that they are leaving the current site...correct? Your mod does not do this for me.

Your mod also opens internal links (from my site) in a new window or tab. I'm using Firefox 3.5. I included glitchpc.com in the whitelist. I had set "rel=nofollow" to off. All other settings were set to "yes".

Those are the issues I'm having with your mod. For the life of me, though, I don't see the difference between your mod and NuHit's mod. How is your mod any different than NuHit's...other than the fact there's supposed to be a redirect message that does not seem to be working for me...along with the fact that internal links are opened in a new window...which shouldn't be happening.

When I installed your mod...I made sure NuHit's mod was uninstalled, first. I tried several times to get your mod to work, but was unsuccessful. It's not that I had given up...I just decided to return to the previous mod I was using that worked fine. The only reason I wanted to try your mod was due to the fact a message was supposed to be displayed notifying the person who clicks an external link that they are being redirected to another site.

Again...I gave this mod every opportunity and it failed on every attempt to get the redirect message to display or to prevent internal links from opening in a new window...even after rebuilding the post cache. If it matters...I'm running vb 3.8.3, vba CMPS 3.2.0 and vba Links Directory 3.2.0. I use quite a few mods...so...I'm not sure if any of them are conflicting with your mod...but that could be a possibility. However...like I said...NuHit's mod is working flawlessly.

Also...aspen0 stated this:

If you mean this mod:

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

It hurts you, technically.

How? NuHit's mod gives you the ability to turn "rel=nofollow" on/off. It opens external links in a new window and you can choose whether to open internal links in the same (or a new) window. It also uses a whitelist. So tell me...how can using their mod technically have me at a disadvantage? Other than the fact if I'm using their mod, I'm not using yours.

Well...that's it...in a nutshell. I look forward to your replies.