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

[Sayid]

Second problem is solved

Try to post this url between [img] tags in your sig

http://i48.servimg.com/u/f48/11/38/19/72/110.jpg

do not forget to turn on redirect in sigs and tell me what happened

[NLP-er]

Originally Posted by NLP-er

Installed and after link clicking on my forum I got:

1||1246761650||88.199.62.36||url=http://www.wp.pl||http://www.forum.simple-nlp.pl/informacje/887-kolejny-test.html||Opera/9.61 (Windows NT 5.1; U; pl) Presto/2.1.1Access Denied, you have been logged.

Got it - it was vbFirewall - this mod: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=196791

[TWTCommish]

Thanks for updating us, NLP-er. Much appreciated.

Sayid: thank you, that's extremely helpful. I believe I've pinpointed the problem; vBulletin has a setting to define the maxium height and width of even remotely-hosted signature images like that one. If an image is above these limits, vB treats it like a link, instead, hence the redirection.

I'll take a look at putting together a quick patch. Thanks again for the clarification.

[AdamJ2]

I don't know why, but all of our signature images, regardless of them being local or remote, are not showing up properly.

The remote ones just show up as a link, while the local ones just show up as SIGPIC (in brackets).

I have even set the option to enable this only for guests, yet it is still doing this for all the non-guests.

[AdamJ2]

Even with all of the options turned OFF in the settings page, the signature pics do not work.

They ONLY work when the product is disabled.

The only other modification installed is vMail. This is on a 3.8.3 install.

[Alfa1]

Thats the same as I am experiencing.

[ade5675]

I am getting a funny error message whenever you click on a member's username ..... saying

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF, expecting T_FUNCTION in /...../..../public_html/naijadiscussion/naijaforum/includes/class_userprofile.php4 on line 158

http://www.naijadiscussion.com/naijaforum/index.php4

[Alfa1]

Links that have variables in them like this, result in an 'invalid url' error:

PHP Code:

viewresource.asp?resourceID=145 


[aspen0]

Originally Posted by ade5675

I am getting a funny error message whenever you click on a member's username ..... saying





http://www.naijadiscussion.com/naijaforum/index.php4

That is likely from an improperly done file edit.

[ade5675]

Originally Posted by aspen0

That is likely from an improperly done file edit.

Thanks, I will look into it and fix it.