Traffic Drop and Soft 404 Errors Increased

[induslady]

Hello,

In my forums, traffic for the month of April suddenly dropped 20% from March. This started happening around the 4th week of March (22nd to 29th time frame). I have been digging into analytics all week and we find that the drop is consistent across all sources of traffic, all countries, OS etc. I am not able to isolate this to a single variable.

The only other clue we have is that soft 404 errors in google web master tools increased around this time. Not sure if that is a coincidence or some other technical change prompted this 404 errors, which also resulted in the traffic drop.

Can anyone throw some light on how do I find the root cause for the drop in traffic. Also is increase in soft 404 error an after effect of this root cause.

Appreciate your response.