Drop in DA and PA and lost a load of links

[Bush_JSM]

Hi Mozzers,

I just check a site in OSE and while the inbound domains are up the total links have dropped and therefore DA and PA.

How can I find which links have gone. I'm assuming a domain passing 1000's of links has either gone down or broken the link - can I use the ISE tool to fine which links have been recently broken? I know there is just discovered for new links. If not can you recommend a tool please.

Thanks

[Bush_JSM]

Many thanks both of you - this is really helpful,

Kind regards,

gareth

[moz_support]

Hi Gareth,

When the index is updated, it's possible you may see your number backlinks drop. When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links rather than crawling your entire site or every site. Our index stores link data for up to 6 months, and if links are not re-discovered from external linking sites they may fall out of the index. It is also possible that we found your links again, but that they did not meet our relevancy threshold and were excluded from the index.

Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to see which specific links were lost between index updates. The best thing we can recommend is to download a CSV of your links to use as a point of comparison for future updates.

I hope that clarifies things!

[GastonRiera]

Hello Gareth,

There are 2 separate things to say here:

1. PA and DA drop. Having lower PA/DA metrics is not always a problem. You should not always relate them with a backlinks losses or with bad backlinks pointing to your site, there is a great chance that the best sites that Moz considers got better, so their metrics will not go further 100, those site that are below them will have lower metrics. 
So, even if you have gotten exceptional backlinks and everything is just fine with your backlink profile ou might not increase PA/DA, and also get lower metrics.

2. (IMO) The best 3 backlink profile tools in the market  are: Ahrefs, Magestic and Moz. The most of the time the 3 reports combined result in the best accuracy in backlink discovery and backlink analysis. For Broken backlinks, Ahrefs has a whole page also some tutorials.
Check it here: Broken Linkbuilding - Ahrefs Blog

Hope it helps.
GR.