Lost Backlinks

[Efexx]

I apologise if this has been asked before but I am not a regular visitor to this board and couldnt spot anything on the page at the time of posting this. >>

Before the beginning of all this google madness our website had over 150 decent backlinks and a PR of 7. Now it has only 28 backlinks, mostly from insite and a PR of 5. Could anyone tell me what is going on as I would find some solice in the fact that im not the only one.

Regards,
Efexx

[mayor]

I think there's a lot of link hoarding going on these days becuase people think outbound links bleed off their Google Page Rank.

Links used to be like candy ... you gave them away without much concern, and they were easy to get. Now people treat them like gold and want you to pay for them in some way.

Page Rank (and link popularity) was designed as a tool for indexing the web. Instead, it has distorted the topography of the web in ways never dreamed of.

Page Rank has become a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.