SERPs lowered if links are lost/dropped ?

Let me explain it.

Lets say you have a bunch of links with "keyword1 keyword2" as anchor text
and you actually rank well for that exact phrase
What happens if you lose those backlinks
Will your SERPs be affected drastically or not at all ?

I have read in some other forums that your SERPs don't get that much affected
I want your opinions/arguments on this

Thanks

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I think both needs a lot of time:

getting good positions because of strong backlinks and also the opposite, loosing positions because of expired backlinks

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I will agree with Olaf, but never actually tested it

Well have personal experience from it, some of my sites are targeting highly competitive keywords so even a small change can change your rank dramatically.
So when some links to my site are removed, yes i see a drop to my keyword position.
The think is, aging it self plays an important role too, you will get more links by time no matter what you do (given the fact that you promoted your site when you released it) but it's a good practice to try to occasionally keep your keywords "fed" (create new links also) cause even if not stated, search engines love new links to your sites.
Have fun

[Why!]

When the page is first crawled it is given a rough index position and any links on the pages are also crawled.
Over a period of time th page is evaluated and assigned a "page strength/page rank/link juice" score the amount of weight its links pass to other sites. This score is periodically checked, but not on every crawl.
When a link is removed the weight being passed to the old link is not actually removed until the re-evaluation of the page weights.

The result a links anchor text and the page weight of the inbound page have a very definite effect on your page. The amount of weight being passed is not determined immediately, the weight is also not immediately removed when the link is removed it takes time. Once the weight has been removed you may see a SERP drop.

Why!
In the old days crawling and algo sorting was done at the same time. These days in an effort to compete with each other all the major search engines are crawling pages quicker and quicker. The problem comes from the fact that to do the algorithm calculations still takes time and processing power so while the pages are being crawled, they are assigned a rough idea of what the ranking will be based on mainly on-page factors. Only when the complete algorithm is applied can they work out a pages real page weight. Similarly when a page is updated Google will crawl it and mark it for re analysis but while Google may have made note of new URLs it will take time for Google to go though all the offpage links and re-evaluate them. For more detailed explanation and how this new style indexing is making it much easier for authority sites to temporarily control certain terms you might be interested in my SERP Hijacking post.

I think that there are so many factors that it would be hard to test with any discernible accuracy.  Also, there's very few constants so with that, much of our suspicions will remain theories.

However, I do think that dramatic drops in the specific keywords in the anchor text or surrounding text would have a big affect on your SERPs for those keywords. 

We need a spy at Google...

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