kidder - 7:53 am on Jun 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

I think we need to take a deep breath and wait, new links may hurt you in the short term but you should bounce back if things have been managed correctly. I've seen this happen recently with a couple of sites. Having said that I have suspect you can cause serious damage to low/ medium strength websites with the right kind of negative SEO campaign. Something that looks like the webmaster just got a bit greedy and overstepped the mark is probably going to do the trick, there are plenty of cheap and easy ways to manage such campaigns...