Gained Links but MozRank drops. Why?

[Fueled]

I'm working with a client whose external followed links rose from 897 to 2792 in about a month. However the client's domain MozRank dropped from 4.52 to 3.82. What is a possible cause for this drop?

[Malarowski]

Such a quick increase in links could mean spammy/low quality links or the ratio of follow/don't follow went awry and that would also decrease it.

In SEO it isn't as black and white as more links == better.

[mad2k]

If you think about white you should consider find on the ...internet... trust rank profiles and site catalogues (using e.g. MozBar and other tools) and follow the rule quoted by Mike ...

Sometimes less =  better,  smaller number of trusted profiles means pretty good juice for your site

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

Exactly.  An increase in links doesn't mean an improvement in your MozRank or Page Rank for that matter.

I had one website that had 20,000+ links to it, but it's rankings were terrible.

Guess why?  It was because the 20,000 links were for one topic and they relaunched the website for another.  The type of links, the anchor text in the links, the places where they are coming from, etc. matter.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

It's likely such a large drop was accompanied by a loss of key links from one Linkscape update to the next. It's also possible the huge jump in number of links came from a relatively small number of sites. For example, a sidebar link from a blog that repeats across 100's of posts, archive, category and tag pages. These types of links pass little value.

Finally, there is some natural fluctuation of these scores from one index to the next. MozRank is comparative metric, so it's best not track your historic MozRank against yourself, but compare each update against your competitors.

Hopefully with the next update you see a rise in your mozRank!