Rankings dropped - lost 3,000 backlinks (but from same domain)

[knielsen]

lost a lot of rankings. 2 things have happened to my site over the past 2 weeks and I am trying to establish which may be the case:

1. My site has 30.000 links from a top news site (on main bar across all pages - not for SEO, it just happened). My site lost 3,000 links from this site last week, when they were doing some cleaning up, which means I still have 25,000+ links from them.

2. My site - job site - has published another job board's jobs so I get paid per click. This means ratio of my job vs external jobs is 1 to 5. So basically, I added last week 5 times more jobs that is already live on external site to get paid per click. In other words, my own site's unique content went down big time.

Which of the 2 is more likely to cause the massive drop in rankings since last night?

[peterlaurent]

The second one most likely, but it could be only partly or unrelated to either. It's hard to give feedback without knowing the business or more details.