Number of links went down drastically on Google

[thu household]

Hello,
Recently our incoming link number on google went down drastically. Earlier when I used to search "link:sitename", it was giving around 650 but now it shows 10 only in last 2-3 days.
We have not done any fraud linking etc.

Question: can it happen for some other external reason? Can it be some temporary thing? Any help on this matter is apreciated.

Thanks for your help.

[tedster]

Google updates their reported backlinks a lot more often than they update PR, but they only ever show a sampling of the links they know about.

As you noticed, they recently decided to report an even smaller sample of links. However, whatever shows up in the Google link: operator means nothing about your ranking, your traffic, or the general health of your site - Google just returns a shifting sample of your backlinks. There's nothing of real value to be learned (or feared) from information reported via the site: operator.

Please see this thread:

Google link: operator - it's not like other search engines [webmasterworld.com]