Thank you for the welcome and your answers. Both pages still sucks after four days, one even moved 10 places deeper. I will give it another week or two, but I really wish I can understand this!
The page that first alerted me were ones that sucked really badly for no reason and 4 days after the signatures were removed they jumped upward and stayed - their position still is nowhere but that is a different issue which can be addressed. At the moment Google seems to be going through yet another of its up and down phases.!!!!
I am seeing backlinks show up from a website of ours we shut well over a month ago and has ben PR 0ed weeks ago too. It isn't even there anymore and still showing up. Tells me the backlink database is completely separate from the standard index and a lot less often updated.
Yep. Sounds like the backlinks Google are reporting are a load of nonsense. I wonder what they are going to do next? Maybe they will turn the SERP's upside down so that everyone who has been frantically doing link exchanges will be at the bottom.
I also see link reports like this: Results 251 - 251 of about 282 linking With just 1 result on the page and the rest disappeared.
Sorry, but I disagree. Looking at links in the link: command it shows reciprocal links, be them low PR, higher PR reciprocal links do not appear. With regard to forum links, I thought the same, and removed some of my links about four weeks ago, after two weeks it did not make any difference to my serps for the keywords within the anchor text of my links.