Backlink checking panic slight

I went to my url using link:myurl yesterday and saw 166 backlinks

Today I saw 1!

What is this likely to mean?

I still seem to have 1,790 references to my site.

Surely something terrible hasn't happend... I havent even started yet.

I am using the twitter tool from livelybrower to get about 600 uniques a day and doing the standard snail blog updates etc. We are also ranking number 1 in a number of keyphrases.

Huh!?

How old is the site?

Don't trust "link:" - it jumps up and down and only shows a fragment of your links...

As an example, it only shows around 50 links for a PR6 site of mine with thousands of links.

Where they all from the same site? If you were blog commenting sometimes you get the latest blog comment added in the sidebar and if google indexed that blog they would see 100 links spread over that whole site. The next day/week they could reindex and find your link is no longer there and you loose them.

Sending group cuddles. ( which in UK speak is term of affection, in US speak means sex )

Site url is 3 years, site launch 4 months

So if you cannot trust links: then what can you trust to measure how close you are to screwing the competition up against a tree....