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.

[Spangle]

Have you used "Fertch as Google Bot" in webmaster tools to find out which pages are causing the 404 errors, that would be my first step.

Is it the server response causing the 404, or is it people with fat fingers requesting a URL which doesn't exist ?

As for the traffic drop, you would have to investigate a lot further, where do you get your main visits from, if it's from the UK remember the schools have been on holidays the past couple of weeks, that could have an effect on traffic, Mums have to look after Children a lot more.

Just idea's to think about.

[nit233]

Originally Posted by 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.

Have you done any kind of link building activity recently? There seems to be a huge drop in the traffic of you website in the past few months.