Why did my domain authority drop?

Start with lost links. A site that linked to you went offline, redesigned, or removed the page. If your referring domain count fell in the same window, that is your answer and the drop is real.

If your link count held steady and DA still fell, it is almost certainly recalibration. Moz rebuilds its index every 3 to 5 weeks and renormalizes the scale each time. Sites that stand still drift down as the rest of the web adds links. A one or two point slide with flat links is not a problem to solve.

Third possibility: Moz changed how it crawls or scores something. This happens occasionally and hits whole categories of site at once. Check whether competitors moved the same direction on the same date. If everyone dropped, you did nothing wrong.

What a drop is not: a Google penalty. Google does not use DA and does not know your DA exists. A DA fall and a traffic fall on the same week are two observations, not cause and effect.

Here is the limit you should know before signing up. RankPulse tells you the backlink count fell from 412 to 389. It cannot tell you which 23 links vanished - I have no backlink index of my own, only Moz's aggregate numbers. For the actual URLs you need Ahrefs or Semrush at roughly $129 a month, checked August 2026.