PageRankBot Troubleshooting Guide

Got problems running the tool? This page lists the most common issues people bumped into when running PageRankBot. If you don't see your problem covered or if the solutions listed here doesn't work, shoot me an email and if I have time I'll look into it.

"MYSQLDatabase: Bad Select: Select domainName ........ table doesn't exist." or "MYSQL Database: Connection Failed"

This is usually due to a MYSQL configuration problem.

Solution:

1. Delete /dist/config.txt
2. Restart PageRankBot.
3. Enter a database name. It can be whatever you want. If it doesn't exist, the tool will create it for you.
4. Enter your username (default MYSQL username is "root", unless you changed it)
5. Enter your password (whatever password you set when you configured your MYSQL server)
6. Press "Apply Changes."

Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/netbeans/lib/awtextra/AbsoluteLayout

Only a few people are reporting this error, so I beliueve this is a machine-specific problem, where the Java JRE isn't up to date.

Solution: Download the latest version of PageRankBot (updated 9/7/2007).

Status Code: 405

Ok, like I said somewhere else, I made that up. Status 405, which is supposed to mean "Method not allowed", I use to indicate URLs where there was a problem either connecting to a URL or retrieving the content of a page. If you're behind a firewall, you might also get this status code.

Solution:

1. Multi-select URLs with status code 405.
2. Edit > Recrawl URL

Subdomains aren't being picked up

You need to crawl each subdomain separately. Subdomains, as far as PageRankBot is concerned, are unique entities.

Other stuff to watch out for

• Inconsistent domain name capitalization (this should be fixed now). As I said to Alex, who first pointed out this bug to me, "Alex, the reason is the tool handles “StyleTips101.com” and “styletips101.com” as two unique URLs. Google Toolbar also happens to have the same problem: in IE, example.com may return a green bar while example.COM returns 0 TBPR. Capitalization variations in a domain name isn’t a bad thing, but since capitalization in a path will cause canonical problems, the solution to this is involves de-capitalizing only the domain portion of a url - which is more costly than just de-capitalizing the entire URL."
• Nofollow links aren't being picked up. One guy asked me why nofollow on his links weren't being recognized. I looked at his source and found he had rel-"nofollow" instead of rel="nofollow."

Anything else I forgot to mention? Shoot me an email.