Do you think Google takes a measurement of the number of links removed (inbound links). Apparently, there are over 200 factors in calculating your SERPs, I wonder if the number of removed links is one of them It would be a good way to flag spam If a site had 100,000's of in bound links, but many of them were later removed, its a good indication that there is some manual link building going using a spamming like process (either that or the linked content is low quality). If I had Cutt's job, I would certainly look into the number of removed links as an indicator of spam sites I think its worth considering this when doing your link building campaign.. any poor / low quality posts, or spam links may end up getting taken down... and this could weigh against you
There not easy answer. Sometimes you can have 100.000 links just from one website, like forum and just several from others domains. If you have 1.000 links from difrent websites and one day it disappear, then website lose worth in eyes of SE and extremally can be banned, because its NOT natural. But if will lose those 100.000 links from one forum and still left several others, this is nothing strange. In Summary: easy counting links not give any measure, you need to know much more about it.
As an SEO, if/when a client experiences a drop in rankings, the backlinks are one of the first places I check.