Explanation of Drop in Domain Authority: 31 to 26 in Four Months

[Kingalan1]

Dear Moz Community:

Domain Authority for my site has dropped to 26. It was about 35 a year ago and has dropped to 26 a few days ago from 29 as recently as last month. In the meantime Google Page rank has dropped from 4 to 2.

Page authority for my home page remains pretty stable at about 37.

Strangely site traffic increased about 25% in early October after the most recent Penguin update, going form about 130 to 170 visits per day.

I ordered a web site audit from a MOZ recommended SEO firm last October. Since November we have focused on implementing suggestions in their audit.We have removed duplicate content from about 30 pages (our site is 500 pages), slightly modified the architecture of the site to allow better indexing of property listings (I run a real estate site), had a mirror site hosted by former developer de-indexed, added structured mark-up language and made some other minor changes.

The audit concluded that about 45% of the domains linking to my site were toxic, 45% suspicious and the remaining 10%. I have yet to take action to remove the bad domains and work on building quality links. But these bad links have existed for the last several years.

I would like to know if anyone has any ideas as to why the drop in my Domain Authority appears to be accelerating? Is this tied with my implementation of the audit suggestions or could it be something else?

I should mention that I have not engages in any social media for about two three months. From January to August I would tweet, Google+, Facebook regularly adding links to my site. Also I have been adding an average of 2-3 blog posts a month, with the exception of November where none were added.

How serious is this drop? Can I recover domain authority through link building? Would removing the toxic links result in a partial recovery?

[KeriMorgret]

I don't have the knowledge to address the rest of your questions, but I do want to let you know there's a bit of an unnatural drop in DA for some sites this index, and it will be fixed in the next index. You may see up to a two point decrease that's our fault, not yours, in this most recent index.

I would add to look also at what the search engines think of your site. Has the number of visitors changed? Have your leads changed? If they're not going down, or if they're going up, then don't sweat the DA metric and enjoy the increase.

[Oren.]

Another thing to keep in mind is how the DA of your competitors has been behaving over the same period.  The number doesn't matter so much as how it moves in relation to your competition.