Check the log view an see what url it is loading at the point it hangs. Highlight the URL with the mouse, copy with control-c, and paste into the "pages to ignore" list on the command view. Then cancel that run. When you rerun OptiLink, it should proceed past the offending page. Also, do a File->Save and send me the file via email so that we may see why OptiLink is not processing the URL.

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.

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.

OptiLink looks like a normal browser to all web servers, Google's included. In fact, OptiLink is a browser, just not a "normal" one. OptiLink provides fairly standard web access behaviour backed by extensive data analysis on your own desktop computer: OptiLink is a specialized browser for webmasters.

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.

OptiLink will sometimes fail to load pages. There are several casues for this. First, the page may be offline (site down) when OptiLink came to call. This will cause the OptiLink browser to time out and produce this error message. There are also some pages, that even when they respond, produce HTML that so full of syntax errors that the parser inside OptiLink can not do the analysis it needs to. This will also produce the same message in the Log. Finally, there is a resource control problem in Windows that can cause a dozen or more of these errors in a row. What happens is the the HTTP connections don't get cleaned up fast enough and OptiLink simply runs out of resources.

OptiLink gets a list of pages that point at your target page, either from the search engines or from a list of URLs you provide. OptiLink then loads each of these pages and finds all links to your page and collects the text in each of those links. it also records the title text of each of these linking pages. So for any given link to your target URL, we have the text used in the link and the title text of the page where the link was found. The link text is used directly at Google and other search engines as part of their ranking criteria and that is what is measured in the "Link Text" column of the Compare view.

Only when the search engines start doing it, and so far, they haven't. The analysis techniques and views provided in OptiLink were derived through actual trial and error and many dozens of ranking analyses. The emphasis in the development of OptiLink has always been on experimental evidence, not theory, and this tradition continues. As soon as we start seeing evidence that Google and the other major indexes weight internal linking with less relevance than external linking, we will upgrade OptiLink to match the engines. Until then, make your internal links as good as you can make them, 'cause t

First, take a look at the quickstart video or the 5 min tour. Make sure you are selecting a link count for at least one of the search engines, or are providing an explicit list of linking pages to check in the "additional pages" listbox.
Next, take a look at the Log View in OptiLink and see if there are any obvious error messages.
Finally, if you still can't figure it out, do a File/Save in OptiLink and send the file to support@optitext.com for diagnosis.

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

On Mac OS-X, Linux, and Windows, open a command-line window and execute
java -version
See your system documentation for how to get a command line window open. The OptiTools programs require at least version 1.4.1 to operate.

Sun Microsystem's installer for the Java Runtime checks to be sure that your operating system is compatible with the Java Runtime before it will begin the install. One of the most important checks it does is to make sure that you have the Microsoft Service Packs installed that are critical to reliable operation of Java. If the Sun installer tells you to first install a service pack, you should download the required service pack from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/default.mspx before you continue with the installation of the Java runtime

The automatic install is the easiest to use, but does sometimes have problems. The manual installer will always work, but is a bit more involved. Here's the step by step procedure. The links below will open new windows so you can come back here as you complete each step.

1. Goto http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html and scroll to the section labeled "Download J2SE v 1.4.2_xx.
2. select the first "download" link for the Windows installation of the JRE and follow the instructions.
3. Once the install of the JRE is complete, you should then be able to use the OptiLink installer in Step 2 of the instructions at http://www.optitext.com/optilink/download.html