What is the true meaning of lost backlinks?

[catch2948]

While i have read a lot in these forums about sites that lost backlinks in the last fiasco in december, I have yet to see any plausable theories as to why this has occurred ...

Case in point ... I have a non - commercial site that has been online for over 4 years ... It is a baseball related site, and is so well respected that I have actual links coming from many major league players' personal websites ... Before the December fiasco, this site had a PR 6 ranking, with approx. 700 backlinks ... Now it shows a PR 0 ranking, and all of my backlinks are gone ... No major changes to the site, all backlinks, and link exchange requests are always thouroughly researched before accepting ...

While I don't make any money as per say from the site, I was getting around 1,500 unique visitors a day ... Now I am lucky if 100 come ... There has to be a reason ...

I would appreciate any and all comments ... As always, thanks in advance for your replies ...

[treeline]

You could have lost an important incoming link during a site update by a newspaper, or key baseball site that was propping up your pagerank, or sending you a lot of visitors.

Though PR 0 is a worry, not fully explained by above, so I would take a look at this thread, A dropped site checklist:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Dougy]

Its not on the same scale as your problem, but one of my sites lost ranking for most of its terms about 2 weeks back due to backlinks not being counted.
When checking allinanchor: keywords, my site which was ranking in top 1-5 for many top terms dropped to 10 - 20 when running the allinanchor command. I was presuming this was down to google not updating my site correctly, but if there are other sites with a similar problem then id be interested to know