Could be. Usually the big spike and drop-off happens where you have taken some action on a large site that creates a “run-of-site” link – i.e. your link appears on many pages on that site. The simple example is a “recent comments” widget in a sidebar of a huge blog.

The other element in the mix is that link counts in Market Samurai (where I assume you are looking) come from Yahoo – so the number of links is simply however many Yahoo found. If Yahoo does a new crawl or re-indexes some sites, the link count can change.

Links will still be counted to your domain even if the pages are broken or search engines are blocked – they just won’t do you any good from an SEO perspective!

Steve

I’m reading your post just right in time:)
I had a similar situation with one of my clients. At the beginning when I checked their sites’ links there were more than 2000 and the site was quite new. After a couple of weeks the amount of links dropped to around 200. What I noticed was that many of these links were coming from 3 sites, they were not from commenting but from submitting a video to these sites.
Another thing is that this client had the privacy settings set up for blocking search engines and allowing only the site to be accessed by the normal visitors. So I also figured out that after I enabled the search engines, they crawled the links and only 200 were the right ones.
What do you think about that? Is this a case similar to the one you describe?

Greetings