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OptiLink Frequently Asked Questions |
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Topic IndexDownloading and InstallingCommon New User Issues, Bugs, and Errors Understanding OptiLink Results Advanced Questions Optional Features Search Engine Questions Recommended Resources Downloading and InstallingDownloading, Installing, and configuring OptiLink on your platform is simple, but the size of the download can be a problem unless you are using a broadband connection. There are three steps to getting OptiLink installed and operating:
I get Error 1316 when trying to install the Java Runtime from Sun. 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.
How do I find out what version of Java I have installed? On Mac OS-X, Linux, and Windows, open a command-line window and executejava -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. The Sun Java Runtime install says it won't install without a new service pack. 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.OptiLink appears to install okay, but when it runs, all I get is an update screen and then it disappears and OptiLink doesn't run. This is always a problem with the Java installation, but there are a number of variations of the problem. Please email support at mailto:support@LinkSecrets.com if you are having this problem and provide the reported Java runtime version (see procedure in this FAQ).Common New User Issues, Bugs, and Errors
I get the error: usage jre-cp I downloaded and installed OptiLink but none of the search engines is enabled. 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.Every page I check has zero links. This isn't working at all! 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.I entered my personal authorization key in the Setup dialog but I still have only 10 links at Hotbot enabled (demo mode). First, check that you really did enter the key correctly. If your key has leading zeros, they must be included as well. If the key is correct, then the problem is almost always an internet connection problem.Since OptiLink is working in demo mode, we can use that to test OptiLink's ability to connect to the internet. Enter cnn.com on the OptiLink Command View as the Taget URL to Analyze and press start. This should find at least 10 links at hotbot and proceed with an analysis. Check the OptiLink Log View to be sure it is connecting to the internet and able to access web pages. if you instead see a rapidly aborted run with an error message in the log view, then you must debug the internet connection for OptiLink. The most likely causes are proxy servers and firewalls. If OptiLink operates correctly in demo mode but still does not authorize when using your key, please contact support via email at suport@LinkSecrets.com and be sure to include your key. Does OptiLink work with Firewall programs and Proxy servers 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. As soon as you have your firewall configured and the correct proxy settings entered, OptiLink will be able to communicate with the web. Your first sign of success will be when your authorization key is validated and the 4 standard search engine interfaces are enabled. When I run Optilink I get no results. What's wrong? 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@LinkSecrets.com for diagnosis. Understanding OptiLink ResultsWhy does OptiLink treat all links the same? Shouldn't links from other sites be given more weight in OptiLink's analysis? 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 they are worth their weight in gold.In the Log View I am seeing the message "Error Loading Page". What is this about? 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. The only known workaround is to (of course) restart Windows. If this kind of thing persists, please contact support at mailto:support@LinkSecrets.comWhat is "Linking Title Density" (in the compare view), how is this measured, and what do I do with it? 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.The titles of linking pages however are not used in ranking. The purpose in providing that information in OptiLink is so you can see what sorts of pages are linking to the target page. This is useful in selecting linking partners and it can be a guide to how well targeted the traffic to your URL is likely to be. See the application secrets guide for some comments on traffic development and assessing traffic quality. I know there are links to my page, but OptiLink isn't finding them. 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. Lesser PR pages are counted in Google's ranking algorithm, but the pages are simply filtered out of the search results. OptiLink only shows single word statistics. How do I optimize for a multiword phrase? Yes, it is true that multi-word phrases are what you will normally optimize for, but the only real way to do that is to optimize the individual words separately. Here's why.If our search is A B C, the search engine will prefer the precise sequence A B C, but it will also provide results positioned for the proper subsequences A, B, C, A B, and B C. It will also return results for A C and even A X C, where X is a word not requested in the query. Each of these search variations are weighted in some unknown way by the search engine so that results can be ordered. We all get a intuitive grasp of what to expect by looking at large numbers of results, but reducing this intuition to a number is not currently solved. What OptiLink provides is the raw percentages for each word, plus the list of actual link text use, to feed into your own intuition. I've found that this is almost always sufficient. The alternative is to incorporate a fixed or variable weighting function that produces a single number, but that single number would always be misleading since we can not possibly know what the real weighting algorithm is in use at the search engines. Advanced QuestionsThis is the NFAQ - the NON-frequently asked questions. Dealing with "out of memory" errors. The Java runtime environment is configured to used upto a fixed amount of virtual memory so that a non-terminating operation can not cause more widespread problems in your computer. The default setting used in all OptiTools programs is 128 Megabytes which is more than sufficient for nearly all purposes. However, if you need more, it can be had by carefully editing a configuration file in the OptiTools installatiion directories. This procedure must be performed without the OptiTools program running.
Optional FeaturesI purchased OptiLink, why do I only have 4 search engines enabled? First and foremost, OptiLink is a tool designed to explain top ranking so that you can do better. Because OptiLink uses the linking structure of the web, we really only need access to the 4 indexes of the web that are used by all the major search portals. The search engines enabled in the standard version of OptiLink provide the easiest and most realiable interfaces to these 4 indexes. OptiLink is constantly updated to keep abreast of changes in the search engines and the aliances between them so that you have access to link index that is available. The additional search engine interfaces not enabled in the standard version are for purposes other than rank analysis and linking optimization.Why are the "Fetch Alexa Rank" and "Fetch Google PR" options greyed out? These are additional features not used in doing ranking analysis. They are available for extra cost to extend optilink beyond its original, and still primary, mission of explaining top ranking so you can achieve top ranking for your own pages. As OptiLink continues to be upgraded and enhanced, the core functionality will remain rank analysis and improvement, but additional features related to the more general task of traffic development and enhancement will also be made available as extra-cost options. The SEPack and GooglePack are the first of two such extensions. See http://www.LinkSecrets.com/optilink/sepx.html for a description of the search engine expansion pack (SEPack) and http://www.LinkSecrets.com/optilink/gp.html for details of the Google pack (GPack). The majority of webmasters do not need either one of these packages.Do I need the expansion packs? Probably not. The standard feature set is sufficient to analyze top ranking in all but the most outlandish categories. Until you have exhausted the features and functions of the standard product, I recommend that you not add the option packs. The one exception to this advice might be the more advanced professional SEOs.Search Engine QuestionsFor 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.LinkSecrets.com/seh. One of your examples shows on-page keyword densities of 33% and 50%. I thought keyword densities this high were penalized by the search engines. Isn't the normal density between 2% to perhaps 7.5% ? Take a look at the source for these pages and you will notice that one involves a javascript redirect and that the other is a framed page. In each case, the spider does NOT end up measuring what you see -- OptiLink likewise does what the spider does. Since the spider skips the frames and only measures the noframe text (plus some text like the title that are common to both framed and noframed content) you can often see some very high densities as folks generally put very little in the noframe tag. As to what percentage is 'too high' -- that is either SEM myth or simply not applicable to google. There really is no 'too high' for google because at google on-page matters so little that it isn't worth worrying about. At google, linking is king.Are sites with the .php extension worth linking with? Do you think they will be spidered if they do not have an html extension? Check to see if the page is indexed by the search engine. If it is, then absolutely, it is an effective link. Google in particular indexes Word files (.doc) and Acrobat files (.pdf) in addtion to HTML. Moreover, a PHP is really just an HTML file by the time a browser or Google's spider sees the page. The only thing unusual is the page filename extension which bothers Google not in the least.I've heard that Google likes sites with lots of pages, is this true? In one word, no. Every page at Google is ranked by itself, not as part of a collection of multiple pages from a single site. This comment only applies to ranking. It may be that the spidering of a site for inclusion into the index involves heuristics that depend in part on the number of pages on the site, but I have not seen such an effect.You mentioned the "mini-net" strategy is very effective. Where do I find out about it? The "king" of mini-nets is Michael Campbell and the best book by far on how to build top-ranking sites from only a handful of pages is Revenge-of-the-MiniNet. Get your copy at http://hop.clickbank.net/?seocntr/dmrev and you will also find a bonus ebook written by me. The bonus covers a technique for conserving and concentrating Google PageRank (PR) using advanced DHTML techniques.Does Google recoginize the queries from OptiLink as "automated" or just like normal browsing? 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.Recommended ResourcesI'm a minimalist -- I don't recommend much, but the people and products listed in this section I whole-heartedly support. Can you do without them? Sure. But should you? No. Being in business is about optimization, and every one of the items list below will help every web business person do more, faster, with less time and money expended. My own collection of articles Past articles I have written on Link Reputation and Dynamic Linking you will find posted at http://www.LinkSecrets.com/pubSearch Engine News This is a must have for anyone serious about search engine marketing. Period. Each month the Unfair advantage ebook is updated and reissued to subscribers and a high quality, information packed newsetter mailed. You might not read every issue (personally, I do) but when the time will come when something changes that you haven't heard about, and you'll go open the last couple issues, and there it'll be reported in SE-News (http://www.LinkSecrets.com/seh).The Michael Campbell Library I found Michael because of his first book, Nothing but Net. NBN, now out of print, was the 'blow-by-blow' description of how he produced $750,000 in revenue in the first year of operations of CellWest with no 'dirt world' advertising -- nothing but the net.With the success of what he did for CellWest, he branched out into other products and services, and wrote about that too in the book Clickin' It Rich (http://www.LinkSecrets.com/cir). CIR showed how he was making $200,000 a year selling 'stuff' like batteries, TVs, and guitar lessons. In his third and latest book, Revenge of the MiniNet, Michael goes all technical on us with diagrams of the precise linking strategies that he has used, and that he has taught dozens of consulting clients. These are Mini-Net strategies that are proven, working techniques being used today by webmasters all over the world. I am especially fond of the Revenge book, because Michael asked me to do a add-on for it named "Dynamic Linking" which you'll get for free when you purchase Revenge. (http://hop.clickbank.net/?seocntr/dmrev). The Dynamic Linking bonus will show, in 40 pages and a couple dozen diagrams and half a dozen code samples, how to use DHTML techniques to conserve and concentrate Google PageRank into those pages where you need it most. This approach fits hand-in-glove with Michael's Mini-net strategy and is by far the most advanced Google positioning technology available today. "I've used several of your techniques from Dynamic Linking, Wow! Too Cool! Thnx" Jamey Ferguson James Martell Where Michael is the Mini-Net king, James is the Maxi-Site king. Which works better? It is usually a toss-up. Both approaches involve about the same amount of content, just organized differently. The best thing you could do is to study both approaches and compare the two, after all, that is what the search engines do. (http://www.LinkSecrets.com/james) |