Two-Step External Links for Link Weight Retention

**Brandon Sheley** · 07-02-2009, 08:02 PM

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.

Two-Step External Links for Link Weight Retention - vBulletin.org Forum

thoughts on this mod?

**tryfuhl** · 07-04-2009, 01:14 PM

Decent tactic, I don't know how well our users would like that though.

**Nick R** · 07-04-2009, 07:32 PM

I'm going to have to give this a try. Thanks for posting it, Brandon!

**Brandon Sheley** · 07-05-2009, 09:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nick R

I'm going to have to give this a try. Thanks for posting it, Brandon!

np Nick
Let us know what you think about it, I'm still not convinced that it's needed or helps in the least.

**Caddyman** · 07-06-2009, 05:42 AM

i have seen sites do this in the past and always wondered what the thinking was behind it, let us know Nick

**popowich** · 07-07-2009, 08:07 PM

I've only installed this on request in the past but are you saying that vBanonymous is a good thing to have installed now?

-Raymond

**Caddyman** · 07-08-2009, 04:46 AM

isn't vbanonymizer the same thing as this? just with a different name?

seems they both use a 2 step redirect.

**GeminiFilly** · 07-13-2009, 11:12 AM

Trying to process this and my question is, is this in addition to using the "no follow external links" if you have that checked when using vbseo?

charice_2000 · 07-15-2009, 06:06 AM

does it work?

adewebstar · 08-10-2009, 07:53 PM

I have been using it for a while and I know it works very well for me and my site. I have RSS feeds to my site and this has help in the ranking with Alexa.

I posted a review on vbulletin.org site for others to see. You can go and see on my site for yourself

vBulletin.org Forum - View Single Post - Two-Step External Links for Link Weight Retention

**Brandon Sheley** · 08-11-2009, 09:32 AM

I don't see how this would have any effect on your alexa rank
it's not like it's creating more visitors, the user is already on your site, so it would in no way effect alexa ranking