Organic Traffic Dropping. 404s found. Is this it?

[davewjones]

My organic traffic has dropped 20% in the past month.   I noticed some major 404 errors today on a very commonly clicked link on our website.

I had the developers fix the error today, but then I thought I'd look in Google Webmaster Tools.  That's when I saw the attached picture.

2454 404 errors were found.  We only have 1500 pages in the entire Google index.

Could this massive amount of 404 errors attribute to this drop in organic traffic?

dU240 dU240

[AdamThompson]

It's certainly possible, if the 404's messed up link juice flow within your site, or caused pages to not get indexed, or something like that.

[CleverPhD]

Agreed.  You said have more 404s than you have pages indexed, that is not good even if your ranks did not drop.  That would mean that while you are being found in the SERPs you are now showing 404s to users.  It is the equivalent of a bar running out of beer during Octoberfest.  Also those thirsty polka dancers with nothing to sell them to drink.

Cheers!