Shortlinks - applying this hack to my site?

Newbie Joined: Apr 17, 2008 Posts: 4

Hi, i wondered if someone could help me out.

A couple of months back we used to have guy who did the majority of our site work for us, after a silly argumanet all went sour and he no longer had access to our site.

Whilst he was still doing work on our site he shortened a few of the site urls' - im unsure how he did this and have serached through my ftp to find the module he installed to shorten the links.

I cannot find anything to do with either a hack/module - the only thing i can see he's done is create a .htaccess file - in this file are the following:

Code:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} (themes|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [L]

RewriteRule ^(Weblinks.html|Weblinks.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=Web_Links&l_op=viewlink&cid=2[L]

RewriteRule ^(Downloads.html|Downloads.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=Downloads [L]

RewriteRule ^(Submitnews.html|Submitnews.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=Submit_News [L]

RewriteRule ^(Userreviews.html|Userreviews.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=JReviews [L]
RewriteRule ^(Privatemessages.html|Privatemessages.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=Your_Account [L]
RewriteRule ^(Contactus.html|Contactus.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=Contact_Plus [L]
RewriteRule ^(index.html|index.htm)/?$ /index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^(modules.html|modules.htm)/?$ /modules.php [L]
RewriteRule ^(Forums.html|Forums.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=Forums [L]
RewriteRule ^(Reviews.html|Reviews.htm)/?$ /modules.php?name=LD_Reviews [L]
RewriteRule ^Reviews(|/|index.htm|index.html)/?$ /modules.php?name=LD_Reviews [L]
RewriteRule ^Reviews-([0-9]*).html modules.php?name=LD_Reviews&op=display_category&sid=* [L]
RewriteRule ^Reviews/(.*)/(.*)/(|index.htm|index.html)/?$ /modules.php?name=LD_Reviews&rop=showcontent&cid=$1&id=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^Reviews/(.*)/(.*)/Page(.*)\.html$ /modules.php?name=LD_Reviews&rop=showcontent&cid=$1&id=$2&page=$3 [L]

Looking at my site url's the only shortened urls are:

- index.html

- Reviews.html (when you click review index within the module page the url reverts back to the old phpnuke one) - also we are not using the standard reviews module we are using one called LD_Reviews which was made through my request for a review module with drop down box & page names.

- Userreviews.html - this is another different review module we use (again not the standard review module that came with phpnuke) - much the same as our main review module the shortened url only appears when you click on the link from our homepage's naviagtion menu.

- Forums.html - only the index page has shortened link.

- Downloads.html - again only the index page has a shortened link

- Contactus.html

- Privatemessages.html (this is the Your_Account index page)

Is it possible to implement the shortylinks hack in to my site with some of the links already being shortened in this way?

Also as our review module uses page numbering/naming along with categories is there a way to shorten these links? This is the main feature of our website so is the most impirtant with regards to having shortlinks.

Sorry about all the silly questions Smile

Thynks in advance for any help

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 857

What I am unsure of is how your links were shortened. Were they hard-coded within the code or was some sort of re-write done such as GoogleTap or GT-NExtGEn? If I had to guess, the links were modified in these modules OR a tiny bit of code was added to your header.php to do an ob_start and then in your footer.php to actually pull the buffered output and rewrite just those links.

I am sure what has been done could be un-done and replace by ShortLinks. However, some of the rewrites are different and so links from search engines would definitely get 404's.

What you could do, though, since there do not appear to be many links that are shortened (if the above is indeed the complete list), and you could add 301 redirects in your .htaccess file to inform the search engines of the moves to the new links.

You can see how my links here on this site to see what these might look like.

Newbie Joined: Apr 17, 2008 Posts: 4

Hi Montego,
Thanks for the reply,

I have taken a look in my header.php and this is what is written (i presume it's to do with the shortened links):

Code:

define('NUKE_HEADER', true);
require_once("mainfile.php");

function processLinks($matches){
$url = $matches[1];
if(strstr($url,'javascript:')){return $matches[0];}
if(strstr($url,'http')){return $matches[0];}
if(strstr($url,'www')){return $matches[0];}
if(strstr($url,'.com')){return $matches[0];}
$thing = explode('="' ,$matches[0]);
$output = $thing[0].'="http://www.pcfrags.com/'.$url.'"';
return $output;
}

function callback($buffer)
{

$buffer = preg_replace_callback('/href="(.*?)"/im', "processLinks", $buffer);
$buffer = preg_replace_callback('/src="(.*?)"/im', "processLinks", $buffer);
$buffer = preg_replace_callback('/background="(.*?)"/im', "processLinks", $buffer);
#$buffer = preg_replace('/href="(.*?)"/im',"href=\"/$1\"", $buffer);
#$buffer = preg_replace('/src="(.*?)"/im',"src=\"/$1\"", $buffer);
#$buffer = preg_replace('/background="(.*?)"/im',"background=\"/$1\"", $buffer);

return $buffer;
}

ob_start("callback");

and the footer.php:

Code:

echo "</body>\n</html>";
ob_end_flush();
die();
}

foot();

?>

Quote:

What you could do, though, since there do not appear to be many links that are shortened (if the above is indeed the complete list), and you could add 301 redirects in your .htaccess file to inform the search engines of the moves to the new links.

Is there a readme file for this action, i know the basics of phpnuke - re-coding is something i have never done - im afraid my phpnuke experience extends to editing files through way of included readme's Sad

It's all a bit new to me since we always had a guy do it for us, apologies for my lack of experience - any help you could give would be greatly apreciated.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my forum messages.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 857

Well, I can honestly say that I have never seen anyone rewrite links in this manner. I just do not see the benefit of shortening the various image URLs, which is also what this appears to be doing.

I am afraid that there is no easy answer here. This is going to take some work to try and convert all of this over to the latest ShortLinks unless you do not care about getting 404s from the Search Engine cached results for a few months. You could have to figure out how to 301 redirect all of these URLs to the new ones...

Sorry to be the bearer of some bad news, but this guy has really done a number on this. This is what I would call a "lazy-tap". Very little SEO value. But, then again, even ShortLinks is questionable on the SEO value. There are more important things one can do to improve upon SERPs such as Dynamic Titles (can get here) and nukeSEO (http://nukeSEO.com).

Newbie Joined: Apr 17, 2008 Posts: 4

Hi Montego,

thanks for the reply.
I have looked in to 301 redirects - but as i have little coding experience - and with none of the tutorials giving very clear instructions on how to perform this action - i wouldn't want to mess around with it.

I presume this is the sort of redirect i would need to perform:

Code:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

But what's the difference between the shortlinks this guy did for our site and the shortlinks your module will output?

I have already installed the dymanic titles hack and find it to be a very useful mod. I am also looking in to dynamic meta tags, image naming and any other little tweaks i can come across to help our sites visibilty.

Ive been looking onto shortened links since we started our PC Hardware review site 15 months ago - but the likes of google-tap and GT seemed very confusing for a newbie phpnuke person. This is why your shortlinks module apealed to me - shame i wont be able to use it due to major lack of coding experience - maybe when i get time in between reviewing pc hardware i can attempt to learn the more in-depth coding aspects of phpnuke.

Thanks for your replies

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 857

Well, ShortLinks is built upon GT-NExtGEn which was built upon GoogleTap.

You can compare the different links by looking at your links vs. what I have here on this site. Wink

Newbie Joined: Apr 17, 2008 Posts: 4

Hi Montego,
The difference between the links you have on your site and the pones on mine are aprt from the index.html they all begin with a capital letter i.e your download is written downloads.html mine is writtem Downloads.html.

If there was a clear readme/tutorial out there that displayed the .htacess file with a 301 redirect in there it may give me some idea of to do it myself.
As i have learned from phpnuke, even a mis-placed ; can cause errors - so with my lack of experience i can't seeme pulling it off first time Smile

I really apreciate you taking the time out to read/reply to my forum posts.

It's a shame this guy did what he did - i obvioulsy trusted/paid the wrong person to admin my site - i won't be making that mistake again!!! At the time he did it i believed he had good intentions, and due to the nature of my site improving pageranks for me means more review items and better prizes for our monthly prize giveaways.

Like you, we like to give something back to the readers/visitors of our website, if it wasn't for people/sites like this one i wouldn't be able to offer my readers these great things and have a nice looking website.

Thanks for all your help - this is one hack that if i want bad enough i will have to go it alone Smile

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 857

I am not aware of any single tutorial. I had to do a bunch of searching on the web to piece some things together. However, I did have a few links awhile back that I needed to get the search engines to "know" that had changed, so here are a couple of examples:

RewriteRule ^ftopic-post-([a-z]*)-(p|t)([0-9]*).html$ ftopic-$1-$3.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^backend.php feeds-1-rss20.xml [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^forumsbackend.php feeds-2-rss20.xml [R=301,L]

There are other ways to do this, but since mod_rewrite is already active on my site (and yours), it just makes the process very easy. Note the R=301, that is what produces the 301 code to the SE crawlers to know to make the change in their index. Wink