I was really intrigued by this email, so I started to do a bit of research. I found several mistakes within the email that no link building company / team should make.

1. The long-tail keyword. It isn’t relevant and it shows me that they have no idea what the business goals of my client are.

2. They own 1000s of Web sites and get you 100s of links. Wow, if that isn’t SPAM and black hat, I don’t know what is.

3. They make mention of “ALL your keywords” but don’t list any of them out. Again, no idea of business goals and certainly not demonstrating any interest in finding them out.

4. They’re sending it to my client’s competitors. Scare tactics don’t work. What if more than one in a set agrees to the services and you’ve promised them “top rankings” for the same keyword? What happens then?

5. I searched “professional link building” and they are nowhere to be seen.

6. Their site isn’t even optimized. Yet they hammer on about “doing all the things the search engines love” to rank. Build links but screw the rest of SEO?

When it was all said and done, we all had a good laugh about it. Then we went back to building links the right way.

Why is this happening? There are any number of explanations including the following:

1. The tool is not 100% accurate. Search engines are notorious for not telling you the whole story.

2. It’s the natural ebb and flow of link development. If there is anything consistent about link building, it’s the fact that the numbers are inconsistent. That’s just how it happens. Links don’t get crawled (or reported), pages (and whole sites) disappear, and search engines update their indices.

3. Search engines are getting selective of what links are worthy of being reported. With SEs constantly updating their algorithms to deliver the best results possible, they quite often evaluate how their weighing individual elements, such as links, that play into rankings.

All of these are very plausible explanations. More often than not, I have found an entirely different culprit at work:

Site wide links.

Also knows as run-of-site links, these links typically reside in the global footer of a Web site and link back to another site. The three telling tales that a group of links are site wide links are:

• All the links come from one domain
• All the links go to one desination page (typically the home page)
• All the links have identical anchor text (typically the brand / site name)

To test and see if a site wide link is dragging down your overall link popularity metric, watch the link popularity of your site and compare it to the pages being indexed of the site linking to yours. If the pages indexed increase, or remain relatively stable, and your link popularity continues to drop, the site wide link is most likely at fault. To be sure, you should focus your measurement just on the page that the link(s) are pointing to.

Is this something to care about? Possibly. Something to panic about? Probably not. The reason for that is because like I said earlier, these links typically have the brand name or site name as their anchor text. If you’ve done a good job optimizing your site, you should already be showing up number one for your brand. If not, you probably have more issues than a site wide link.