tedster - 10:23 pm on Jan 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

In the past, Google's reporting data (Webmaster Tools, or the link: and site: operators, etc) were always a second layer of data access, one that was performed after the ranking calculations, and not before. So that kind of report data was not causing anything.

That fact certainly does not rule out a deeper bug in the process right now, because something out of the normal run of things does seem to be going on. Google is moving a lot of data around, and sometimes the data imports are buggy. However, I would not assume that any ranking drop that lasts more than a few days was an error.

[edited by: tedster at 2:47 pm (utc) on Jan. 18, 2010]