I frequently analyize other sites in my industry, and other sites with similar keywords, and I've noticed that this week a lot of sites have lost a lot of their Google links (including my own). Are my eyes deceiving me? Surprisingly though my traffic is up a bit this week.
Google devalues links all the time. Use yahoo or google webmaster tools for a more accurate count of your backlinks.
Yes I noticed the same thing, but I'm not concerened as Google only display as tiny fraction of the known links. I think this was to stop people from hammering their servers to get a complete set of backlinks. Why they didn't just remove the link: function completely I don't know because the current implementation is useless. I bet they did it to stop a massive backlash like MS got when they dropped their link: command!
i suggest you to check your backlinks nearly one month later. google may make stupid think for these days because of the pr update
Google has never shown all the backlinks just a sample. Use yahoo siteexplorer to get a more accurate backlink count.
I don't think either Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools shows all the links in their link databases.
Nothing to worry most of us have the same situation , give them some time and of course continue to work.
I have seen daily traffic go from over 1000 down to 100 back up over 1000 and just about 0 on one site over the last couple of weeks for a lot of 3 and 4 word searches. There was one fix I did on the first dip (I had a few pages doing too well in SERPs that were upstaging the pages I wanted to show in SERPs) but I don't know about today's dip.