Drop in domain authority for myself and all my competitors, was something changed?

[EcommerceSite]

On the 1/11 report all four websites dropped, and starting on 2/12 they all dropped a few more times. These are all large companies who are completely white hat. Was something changed? The reason I asked is all of our linking C-Blocks dropped as well. Mine dropped from 114 to 42 and I have no idea why. All of my competitors dropped as well, is this related?

[EcommerceSite]

We never had any link building strategies. External followed links has gone from 346-402. The site had amazing seo completely by luck, the site was redone in November and so there has been renewed focus on seo the last few months.

[jws8118]

Focus on external followed links gained over time.  If you can show links are being built that are quality then that should outweigh the lack I'm the other metrics bc you could be losing ground bc of old link strategies that are still weighing you down.

[EcommerceSite]

I understand but MozRank and MozTrust have both dropped as well. Essentially everything on the competitive analysis has dropped the last few months and nobody has been able to tell me why. So when my boss look at that analysis and everything is trending down it looks bad for me.

[TomRayner]

Keep doing what you have been doing and accrue links in the right way.  Produce excellent content for your site and guest content and earn high quality citations from reputable websites.

If you don't mind me saying - I find it strange that your job performance is tied to metrics that can be put out of your control, due to fluctuations in the way the crawler updates and at the intervals it does.  Doesn't seem very tangible to me when compared to traffic and/or conversions, which I'm sure you're tracking too.  I'd only point out how the fluctuation has effected your competitors and potentially sites across the board.  If you have extended a 'lead' over some competitors, or closed a 'gap', in terms of PA/DA, try and report that.

[EcommerceSite]

My job performance is tied to these stats. So even though organic traffic is the same it still doesn't look good for me. If I just tell him its random fluctuations he will probably ask why hasn't it fluctuated up. The total drop for domain authority was 35 to 30. Any ideas on how to boost that?

[TomRayner]

One of the Mozketeers will be able to answer this in more detail, but it will mainly be down with how the Moz bot crawls, rather than anything to do with what you have done.  For the record, I've seen drops for my sites and our competitors too.

If we look at the update history, you can see that this month saw 142 million root domains crawled and 802 billion links, a fall from 149 million and 829 billion, respectively, in February.  This might go some way towards accounting for the drops.

But there's nothing really to be worried about if it has kept things mainly on par.  It's beyond your control in any case so don't worry too much!