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Hello, Do you get traffic from more than one country? If so, are you checking your rankings in each Google? Are you searching depersonalized? The last thing, the number of searches does vary, it could just be that there are less searches for your keywords at the moment. Check with google trends.

In regards to the bold tags, I don't recall reading anything about having too many bold tags will lower your ranking or affect your ranking.  However, having too many bold tags might cause bad user experiences though.

Hey, This WBF might be of some use: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-sitewide-reciprocal-and-directory-links The one thing I would add is to make sure the anchor text is pretty natural, i.e. your brand term. I have also seen it suggested to have one 'partners' page then sitewide link to this page and only have the one external link on this page. All the best