Some clients just absolutely demand that links to other sites should open a new window,
in order to provide external links, while also keeping their own visitors on their site.
The method typically relied on to do this is to add a target attribute to each individual
link. That method has two flaws:
Manually managing every single link is time consuming, while automating the process
introduces potential errors (such as duplicate target attributes) which could break
code validation or could break the links themselves.
There is SEO value to direct linking to external sites. While contemporary search
engines are primarily link counters, there are a number of patents that insinuate
certain values to links based on their attributes, including the link target attribute.
If your content is intended to link to a site and pass search value to it, you should
consider not including a target attribute in order to preserve as much link juice as
possible.
Back to the point. The code here simply enumerates every anchor on the page and adds
target="_blank" to each link that goes to a domain other than the active one.
While you could add this script to the specific pages you want to affect, it's easiest to
simply add a script tag to a script with the following contents:
The Code
/*
Shawn K. Hall
http://12PointDesign.com/
Copyright (c) 2004,2010
*/
function blanky(){
// remove trigger
try{
window.clearInterval( blankyt );
}catch(e){};
// set external links to new window
var c = document.links;
var d = document.domain;
for(var a=0; a<c.length; a++){
if(c[a].href.search(d) == -1)
c[a].target = "_blank";
}
}
var blankyt= window.setInterval( "blanky()", 3500 );
If you are using a script tag, you'd use something like this:
