If running either OptiLink or OptiSpider under Windows Vista, the programs will NOT remember your Authorization key from session to session (i.e. you will have to re-enter it under the File > Setup dialogue every time) UNLESS you follow the steps outlined below! Yes, there's finally a solution!

1. Go to the Start Menu. On the right hand side, "Computer" is listed. Click this. This opens Windows Explorer.

2. Navigate in Windows Explorer to the following location: C:\Program Files\OptiTools\

3. RIGHT Mouse click on OptiLink.exe. This opens the 'context menu'. Select 'Run as Administrator' in the context menu. This opens OptiLink.

The combination of OptiLink and OptiSpider used together can almost do what you want, with one caveat.
Here goes:
First run OptiSpider on the domain where you are considering links. This will spider all the pages on the site, which should be all and only the pages Google will find.

The IOException error indicates that OptiTools was not able to load a webpage. It automatically retries several times, so you may see several of these errors together. These errors are caused by any of:

This is generally due to the server not
responding within the network timeout
period set on the Command View. This
can be a temporary problem, or it can
be more pervasive. Try again with a
larger timeout.

Search Engine spiders, and therefore OptiSpider as well, will not spider through framesets. Put the links to the rest of your site in the noframes section, which both the search spiders and OptiSpider will read and desend into.

OptiLink will use whatever sources of linking pages you instruct it. If you select a search engine, only those reported by the engine will be analyzed. You can augment this list by entering them in the "additional pages" list. See the application secrets guide for details.

Recheck that the auth key is entered correctly on the file->setup dialog and press accept. Make sure you are connected to the internet when you do this as OptiLink will access our server to verify the key.

If you still see only hotbot, check to see that OptiLink works in demo mode, which will verify its access to the internet. Proxy servers and Firewalls are a common issue.

Please see the installation troubleshooter and follow the diagnostic process presented there as it covers all download, installation, configuration, and new user errors currently known. Failing a resolution to your problem, you will find the telephone technical support number shown in the last step in the troubleshooter.

The focus of OptiLink is ranking analysis so you can
determine in advance of a project about how much
effort a top10 ranking will require.

The general purpose of OptiSpider is to spider all the pages reachable from a specified page, that are on the same domain as the target, and to present in one place everything you need to know to optimize your site.

· Spiders your entire site to make sure that every page on your site is findable
and that there are no spider loops within your site. If OptiSpider can’t spider your site correctly, it is likely that the search engines will not be able to either.

The limit of 1000 is a limit imposed by the search engines, not by OptiLink. You will find this same limit imposed when accessing search engine results from any normal browser. You can generally obtain and analyze more than 1000 links by selecting more than a single search interface because the different engines will return links in different orders. OptiLink automatically removes duplicates and reports the total unique pages found for analysis.
That said, this is almost never necessary for ranking analysis as we really only need a "representative sample" of links for comparison, not all the links actually recorded at the engine. I rarely use more than 100 - 500 links to explain why pages rank as they do.

No, you can't enter a domain name or wildcard page names in the Pages To Exclude List Box. Even if we could do that, it wouldn't increase the number of results we get from the search engines. The thing to understand about exclusions is the search engines return a maximum of 1000 pages. The exclusions you list are applied by OptiLink AFTER the search engine has returned results.

If you do have hundreds of pages you would like to ignore in your analysis, there are a couple of ways to do that. In both cases, first do the analysis without ignoring any linking pages. After that completes, go to the Pages View and use the right mouse button behavior to export an entire table out to a spreadsheet program.

That sounds like a book offered by one of my affiliates. the bonuses that come with optilink include the application secrets guide which you will find a link to in the thank you email where you received your authorization key.

Google has decided that OptiLink violates the Google terms of service and has therefore banned the site. The same is true of Webposition and every other serious SEO tool on the planet.

Google would like to see OptiLink removed from the market, but since they can not detect its use, they are left with nothing but banning my sales letter.

Second, I have not submitted that site to the engines as I do not rely
(ironically) on search engine marketing to sell OptiLink. The program is sold by a network of affiliates that comprise most of the biggest names in SEO and SEM. Their sites show up just fine. Under the term I invented to describe what OptiLink does -- "Link Reputation" -- you will find at Google a number of affiliate sales pages. BTW, the larger affiliates are not listed there, as they primarily sell OptiLink via endorsements in their newsletters.

For the best and most current advice on what the search engines and directories are doing to you and to each other, you have to subscribe to SE-News at http://www.optitext.com/seh.

OptiLink will look for links in the search engines you select, and in the list of additional pages you provide. There is no other way available for OptiLink to find links. You can check for yourself what links are available in the selected search engines by using the same query that OptiLink does, typically "link:" followed by the full URL of page. After running OptiLink you will find the search engine results page on the internal browser window in OptiLink.
There are many reasons why links are not found by the search engine (and thereby OptiLink). One very common problem is the "PR4" filter at Google, where the list of linking pages includes only pages with a PageRank (PR) of at least 4.

Firewall programs will need to be configured according to the vendor's instructions to allow OptiLink unrestricted access to the internet. OptiLink need not be modified or configured in any way for your firewall.
For use with Proxy servers, OptiLink supports the most common authentication scheme, called "Basic Authentication". OptiLink does not currently support Digest and NTLM authentication.
To configure OptiLink for use with a proxy server, simply start OptiLink and enter the proxy configuration data into the File/Setup dialog and check the proper proxy options near the top of the dialog. Your system or network administrator should be the best source of information concerning these proxy settings.

Make sure you have selected a number of links to fetch from the search engines. In the command view, there is a count of links to fetch for each of the engines you have enabled in your copy of OptiLink. If all of these are zero, OptiLink will not fetch any links from the search engines. This can be useful if all you want to do is analyze links from the list of pages in the "Additional pages to include" list, but if there are no additional pages and no search engine counts, OptiLink has nothing to work with.

You probably need to enter your personal authorization key into the File/Setup dialog. This key was emailed to you for your own personal use when you purchased OptiLink. To enter this key into OptiLink, start the program and chose the File menu, and the Setup option on the File menu. A dialog will open and the key should be entered into the last field of that form and the Accept button pressed. OptiLink will then validate the authorization key using the web and enable the program.

I get the error: usage jre-cp ...
This is what happens when you execute the optilink.exe file in the install directory. This will not work. You must run optilink from the shortcut provided on the start menu in the OptiTools folder.

Make sure you have the latest version of Java installed. Or, you may have more than one version of Java installed.

Here's what to do:

Open a command window (Start->Programs->Accessories->Command)
and type:

java -version

this should respond with some variation of Sun microsystems 1.4.2.
if not, use the Add/Remove Programs applet in Control Panel to remove
ALL java runtimes, and reinstall the correct version using the link on
my download page.

the "set" command should be in autoexec.bat, rather than config.sys,
but that's not required in XP -- there's a GUI for it now.
Some versions of Windows seem to require that the
system environment variable TEMP or TMP must be set to point to the user Documents and Settings folder.

In general, this is not a requirement and we are unsure why
some systems require this setting. That said, here is what to do:

Click on Start->Settings->Control Panel->System
(you may have to 'switch to classic view' in control panel to see System)
in the System applet, select the Advanced tab and press the