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

[NLP-er]

Originally Posted by aspen0

I'm sorry NLP'er, I'm not understanding your issue.

so look on this link:
http://www.forum.simple-nlp.pl/exter...tp://www.wp.pl

There is an error about aess denied. But thi is not access to externalredirect.php, because when you go here:
http://www.forum.simple-nlp.pl/externalredirect.php

It generates. So somesthing is wrong with externalredirect.php code. Whad to do to have it working?

[Sayid]

Hi,

First I want to thank you, I like seo mods btw .

I,m afraid now before installing about this ,

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.

Is it a bug ? I mean when install this mod , forums signatures that have external images will not displayed ??

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by Sayid

Hi,

First I want to thank you, I like seo mods btw .

I,m afraid now before installing about this ,



Is it a bug ? I mean when install this mod , forums signatures that have external images will not displayed ??

it was fixed in the last update I believe.

[aspen0]

Originally Posted by NLP-er

so look on this link:
http://www.forum.simple-nlp.pl/exter...tp://www.wp.pl

There is an error about aess denied. But thi is not access to externalredirect.php, because when you go here:
http://www.forum.simple-nlp.pl/externalredirect.php

It generates. So somesthing is wrong with externalredirect.php code. Whad to do to have it working?

I have no idea, there is nothing in the mod that would print out a page like that. It has to be a conflict with something you have on your server. A setting that handles query strings for PHP pages, a security setting that disallows URLs from being in query strings, something like that.

[NLP-er]

Originally Posted by aspen0

I have no idea, there is nothing in the mod that would print out a page like that. It has to be a conflict with something you have on your server. A setting that handles query strings for PHP pages, a security setting that disallows URLs from being in query strings, something like that.

:/ Ok - till solution mod dissabled. I send query to my hosting company - see do they will find out somesthing. Thanks anyway

[Sayid]

It works

But as I said about signatures,

it shows the url of the image like this

PHP Code:

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a58...o1ni0220-1.jpg 


when I click on it, it redirects me as expected .. And if there is an image without extension like attachments of other forums, it give another message in redirect page which is "Invalid url"

PHP Code:

http://localhost/123vb/externalredirect.php?url=http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/11/38/19/72/110.jpg 


Note: I installed it in localhost forum.

btw, I think vbanonymizer does redirect . Is there a difference ??

[Sayid]

another small bug

URL that contains '&' gives the same invalid message in redirect page

example:

http://localhost/123vb/externalredirect.php?url=http://www.external.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=56

[NLP-er]

Originally Posted by Sayid

btw, I think vbanonymizer does redirect . Is there a difference ??

I just installed it - difference is that you don't have to make strange file edition which will disappear after next vb update like in this mod. Unfortunately i have same behavior like in this mod... So right now I'm sure that my problem is not with mod but something else...

[TWTCommish]

Originally Posted by Sayid

Is it a bug ? I mean when install this mod , forums signatures that have external images will not displayed ??

I used a signature picture on my test forum and it worked fine, so I've been unable to duplicate the problem in question. I'm not sure if it's limited to this one user, who seems to have many modifications installed.

It also, in theory, shouldn't change it, if only because it only modifies links passed through vB's link creation function. Can't imagine that vB would be passing image URLs through that by default.

[TWTCommish]

Originally Posted by Sayid

another small bug

URL that contains '&' gives the same invalid message in redirect page

I've attached an updated externalredirect.php file that relaxes the URL validating regular expression a bit. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!