Ranking

I was holding around 3rd page for a while, but then I noticed with seo quake i lost about 1000 or so links and I fell off. Why?

You lost 1000 links and then dropped in the SERPS?

What types of links did you create? Forum profile, social, article, etc... Your links could have been deleted. I don't use it much but an example of a dangerous linking that is ready to be deleted would be senuke's profile linking module.

Just my 2 cents

Google sometimes just updates its index and de-indexes spammy links. That's likely the cause.

Those 1000 links sounded like poor, spammy links. Can you provide more info?