What could cause your Domain Authority score to drop?

[ACann]

We have 3 websites that are on 3 different campaigns.  Our flagship website is www.cannontrading.com.  The Domain Authority score on it was 42.  When I first (Mid November 2012) started, we had 295 keywords allocated for Cannontrading.com and 5 other keywords for allocated to our other websites... e-futures.com and e-mini.com.  What I wanted to do was optimize the other two pages and I did this by taking taking 50 the keywords that were not ranked in the top 50 from Cannontrading.com and assigned them to the our other two sites.  Could this have caused the drastic drop in the score?  Our keyword rankings for the "Top 3" has dropped from 93 to 34 since November 2012.

We did have a company that did article submissions for us up till October 2012.  Could this have caused our drop in the Domain Authority Score and our Keyword Rankings?

I didn't make any other changes to Cannon website beside taking away those keywords and given them to our other sites.

Any suggestions or thoughts would really help me.

Regards,

David

[OlegKorneitchouk]

DA is determined  mostly by the backlinks to your site. The higher quality (sites with high DA) and quantity of backlinks to your site, the greater your DA.

As far as I know, there are no backlinks that would negatively affect your DA.

[ACann]

If we had a company doing articles submissions and they stop doing it, would this affect DA score and the keyword rankings?  Like I said, I haven't changed anything to the site except taking 50 unranked keywords from t he campaign and adding it to our other two websites campaign.