This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

WP No External Links

Description

Convert all external links into internal or nofollow links!

This plugin is a fork of the hijacked and vulnarable “WP No External Links” plugin.

The following critical issues have been fixed:
– Removed Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability.
– Removed backdoor injected into original plugin.
– Fixed creation of the new links_stats table: added charset collation and table existence check.
– Fixed “Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes” error on creating mask_links table.
– Added removing tables on uninstallation.

No External Links plugin is designed for specialists who care about the number of outgoing links that can be found by search engines. Now you can make all external links internal! Plugin does not change anything in website database – it just processes the output. Now you don’t need to worry about your page rank dropping because of spam bots. You write any kind of http link and it becomes internal, hidden or nofollow! Of course, all the links will still be usable.

To make the long story short, your links like “http://gmail.com” will be masked into
“http://YourBlog.com/goto/http://gmail.com” – or
“http://YourBlog.com?goto=http://gmail.com”

Features

  • Masking links in posts, pages, comments or on the whole website including widget, theme footer, etc.
  • Outgoing clicks stats.
  • Javascript redirect with custom text and timeout.
  • Masking links with digital code and base64.
  • Completely removing links from your posts.
  • Custom redirects.
  • Disabling masking for registered users.
  • Disabling masking on per-post basis.
  • Using nofollow and noindex instead of redirection.
  • Excluding URLs from masking.
  • Masking links in custom fields.
  • Extending plugin with your own functions.

If you need any extra features, just create a ticket via support forum.

Known Issues

This plugin may conflict with your caching plugins, including Hyper Cache. Usually adding redirect page to caching plugin exclusions works fine.

If you disabled this plugin and still have links masked – check your chaching plugins.

Installation

  1. Upload the complete folder no-external-links to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  3. Configure plugin via No External Links link under the Settings.
  4. Write posts with any kind of links, watch comments with links.

FAQ

Is it an evil hack and black SEO?!

No. Please read Google’s topics on SEO

How can I exclude my page with links from masking?

Just put URLs you need to the exclusion list or disable masking for specific post.

I’ve removed your plugin but links are still masked!
  • Deactivate other links related plugins.
  • Clear cache via chache plugins you are using.
  • Deactivate caching plugins.
How can I mask links in a custom field?

You will have to add just a line in a theme code where you output custom field data.

To add same preprocessing for data as for comment text, use
$metadata=apply_filters(‘comment_text’,$metadata);

For example, if you use some kind of metadata, it should look like this:
$metadata = get_post_meta($id, ‘MetaTagName’, true); // get data from wordpress database
$metadata=apply_filters(‘comment_text’, $metadata); // add this line of code for preprocessing field value
echo $metadata; //output preprocessed field value

Use “the_content” instead of “comment_text” if you want to use the same masking policy as for post text.

Reviews

Gulan 23, 2022
It was last updated 3 years 5 months ago and tested up to WordPress 5.0.16. Plugins can be removed from wordpress.org for various reasons. This can include benign issues like a plugin author discontinuing development or moving the plugin distribution to their own site, but some might also be due to security issues. In any case, future updates may or may not be available, so it is worth investigating the cause and deciding whether to temporarily or permanently replace or remove the plugin. Get more information.
Kanûn 15, 2018
whats its the different to "Midhan: No External Links" looks like you guys develops the same plugin with different names ? work together and make it great.
Sibat 6, 2018 1 reply
link with symbols # not working .... 99% of referral links have those symbols ... Have you ever tested it before publication? I think its becouse of "Use javascript redirect". Can you fix this ?
Read all 5 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“WP No External Links” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “WP No External Links” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.0.2

  • Add: WordPress 5.0 compatibility.

1.0.1

  • Fix: base64 links encoding

1.0.0

  • Add: Plugin released