Cannot Find Bulk External URL Shortening Plugin

  • I’m trying to fix all external links on my site by cloaking them or replacing them with shortened URLs. This is my last ditch effort to avoid stripping all external links from the site. This is necessary because changing the site’s content or where it came from are not options and the host sites have been manually labeled bad neighborhoods by Google.

    The next logical solution to look for is replacing the on page links with cloaked or shortened links. I have already heard personally from Thirsty Affiliates and Pretty Links both of which claim to not offer the functionality I need. I simply asked if their plugins could scan all posts for external links, save those URLs in a database, and replace the URLs in the content with ones to a page on the site in robots.txt blocked directory with a redirect to the external destinations. No plugin can honestly call itself a useful cloaker without this feature but no plugins in the WP directory which promote cloaking have it.

    Now I am looking for simply URL shorteners but am finding such features limited to just internal links. Jetpack for instance offers a shortening feature but it won’t shorten external links. It only allows for shortening of on site links for the purpose of sharing. I need something that will scan all my posts and replace all external href attributes with shortened ones.

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  • Hello

    You can communicate with the plugin developer, you have to make it yourself by developer.

    Thread Starter wpbroken2much

    (@wpbroken2much)

    I am a plugin developer and I am trying my best not to have to make my own plugin to accomplish such basis tasks.

    It shouldn’t be hard to write a PHP script which extracts external URLs from posts, saves them in the database, and replaces the original post URLs with URLs to pages which redirects outside the visibility of search engines. The hardest part for me would be overcoming script timeout constraints on my server. This means I will have to learn to write the plugin so it can run via WP-CLI or create some type of AJAX UI which shows the progress of the job with an option to pause.

    I have never made a plugin which uses WP-CLI and I have never used javascript on any of my prior plugins. All my prior plugins have been written entirely in PHP. I shouldn’t have to learn anything because plugins like ThirstyAffiliates and PrettyLinks claim to offer competent cloaking solutions but if you contact either one they admit lacking the basic features I describe here.

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