SHOCKED! Losing Backlinks in droves!!!

[fortune68]

I am utterly shocked - within 1 day, I have lost about 70 backlinks to my site Beach Theme Home Decor
I am using Yahoo Site Explorer on my toolbar to be able to check stats, and overnight my Link Index went from 240 down to 170!!! That's heaps! Same thing happened about a month ago, I used to have close to 300 backlinks, when it suddenly went down to 240. What is going on?
Last time, when my links went down, my Google PR dropped from a 3 to a 2, as well. Are these to incidents connected?? Will my PR go down to 1 or even 0 now?
I am freaked out! Can somebody explain this, and how can I prevent this from happening?

[caravan]

Where were the lost backlinks coming from? Are you getting the same behaviour from Google Webmaster Tools results?

[ctabuk]

Hi - I'm not the most technical guy on the planet - but the taking just one IBL
Beach Decor - The Basic Rules To Get It Right

From that I see underscores - SEO guys - could the bots be misreading them as no follows??

Maybe too many OBLs - I have loads of OBL's but I also have loads of incoming.

[jabo]

Last week, I used a tool and it showed me 300 000 BL, a few days later I was shocked to find out that almost half of it was gone, got really sort of scared by it and only after a few days did I realize that the tool I used was not functioning well....

[chowell]

Were some the links pretty questionable (e.g. paid or blog comments) or did they follow any kind of common pattern?

[jobster]

i have seen this a fair bit lately, i seems some of the major search engines have had updates and lots of iffy links have lost their juice-perhaps thats what happened to your site

[Final Expense Leads]

Yahoo consistently drops inbound links, in my experience, that have no Page Rank or particular relevance to the site topic. They persist for a while in Yahoo's index and then roll off.

Seems pretty normal to me.

[celebritydirect]

Well it happens, you should diversify from where you get your links. Different kind of sites, and never get links from blog networks.

[Web Design Company]

We had the same problem with Google...though the scale was smaller.We started with 1 backlink, raised it to 31, then dropped back to 29. On the other hand, the inlinks shown by Yahoo has constantly risen and is currently at 700+.

[MajorTom]

Are you using SiteExplorer to count your backlinks or are you using the following command

linkdomainyzmysite.com -siteyzmysite.com

I've found that using the search query above generally gives you a more accurate representation of backlinks

[grishamist]

All of us are affected on losing backlinks especially on Yahoo. I don't know if they update or just a rotation of their algo.

[nixwebo]

I have seen the same thing from time to time in google. I think a lot of the time it may be caused by sites that have links back to yours may be getting blacklisted. If you have the same link text on every link this can cause some issues with certain search engines too.