Domain Authority and Links drastically decreased in less than a month

[everestagency]

I'm fairly new to SEO, and am left completely perplexed about why our two SEO client's links and DA decreased so drastically in so little time.

Looking at their stats on Moz, between May and June, their DA's went down by 3-5 (which, they were fairly low to begin with), and external links were halved! This is rather concerning to me as building their external links has been my focus for the past few months for both of them.

There are a number of tweaks that I could make to site structure in terms of meta descriptions and page title length (though I can't fix that as the clients want to keep the titles as is), however there are no critical errors. I have also placed a lot of filters on both of their Google Analytics pages as they were getting what I just now realized was a ton of spam, though I don't see how that would affect anything.

I just can't imagine what lead to all of those external link suddenly dropping. I imagine the drastic drop in those lead to the DA decrease, but again, I'm very new, so I'm not certain.

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. I have been panicking quite a bit since I've seen this!

[KyleEaves]

Sure thing, those posts from May were probably after the last release of the index (May 5th). Hopefully you will see your site's DA return to a similar level, or even higher with the next release of the Index (scheduled June 23rd). Here are a few additional threads with more explanation. Nothing to worry about, you're not alone.

http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates
http://moz.com/community/q/what-causes-total-external-links-to-fluctuate-so-much
http://moz.com/community/q/significant-drop-in-external-followed-links

[everestagency]

Ah, I had read about that change in a similar post from May, and thought it had been resolved. Thank you for the quick response. Will try to turn off the panic now!

[KyleEaves]

Other users have experienced similar things with the most recent MozScape index since it was smaller than previous ones. There should be a new update coming in about two weeks, that will be a good opportunity to measure results and compare with previous Indexes. Since your client's sites don't have many links to begin with, even small variations in the index could cause major shifts in the site's DA. Check out this thread below for an explanation, it sounds like you're experiencing a similar situation.

http://moz.com/community/q/domain-moztrust-domain-mozrank-dropped-down-to-zero-why-also-an-important-backlink-is-gone