Traffic Got A Hit Last Week; Down ~40% . Am I Doing Anything Wrong?

I was planning to do an article on this once I recover my traffic and have something concrete to tell everyone about what works and what may not. I've found out that Google says that 404 errors don't affect your rankings; but in reality, they do - if the number is large. Though the problem was bit 'rare', I found out another webmaster who's in similar situation as I am. He posted a graph of 'errors' reported and the search traffic: see - http://www.diigo.com/item/image/1dbpl/wrbp (that's not the graph for my website).
 
TheBigK said:
I was planning to do an article on this once I recover my traffic and have something concrete to tell everyone about what works and what may not. I've found out that Google says that 404 errors don't affect your rankings; but in reality, they do - if the number is large. Though the problem was bit 'rare', I found out another webmaster who's in similar situation as I am. He posted a graph of 'errors' reported and the search traffic: see - http://www.diigo.com/item/image/1dbpl/wrbp (that's not the graph for my website).
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Google said that 2 years ago. They also insinuate redirects are not the "correct way" of dealing with missing pages on their help pages:
Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Such pages are called soft 404s, and can be confusing to both users and search engines.
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http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2409439

As for the redirects, I guess the volume is so large doing them one by one is out of the question, so I am not sure how to do it.
 
MagnusB said:
Google said that 2 years ago. They also insinuate redirects are not the "correct way" of dealing with missing pages on their help pages:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2409439

As for the redirects, I guess the volume is so large doing them one by one is out of the question, so I am not sure how to do it.
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Well, I've been through those pages - and at first I decided to be silent for some time until Google finds out that those tags were actually not adding any value. However, because it suddenly finds large number of 404s, it's lowered our rankings (just like in the screenshot I shared in my previous post). I contacted Google and got a confirmation that there was no manual penalty to the site.

But given Google's own way of handling the 404 errors; it takes lot of time for it to drop from their crawling list. I'm not sure what should I really do now. 'Redirecting' only the missting tag pages to homepage is the only thing that I can do - but I'm not 100% sure whether I should really do it. Will it harm?
 
I had around 10k 404 errors in webmaster tools due to a similar thing - removing tags pages. I didn't really notice any change in ranking.

You know, ranking drops in Google doesn't necessarily mean *you* are doing something wrong. For example, it could be that your competitors recently got some powerful links causing a shift in the SERPs. If one site goes up, others have to go down.
 
x3sphere said:
You know, ranking drops in Google doesn't necessarily mean *you* are doing something wrong. For example, it could be that your competitors recently got some powerful links causing a shift in the SERPs. If one site goes up, others have to go down.
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Well isn't that $#!^? That's some bull$#!^ to me.
 
x3sphere said:
I had around 10k 404 errors in webmaster tools due to a similar thing - removing tags pages. I didn't really notice any change in ranking.

You know, ranking drops in Google doesn't necessarily mean *you* are doing something wrong. For example, it could be that your competitors recently got some powerful links causing a shift in the SERPs. If one site goes up, others have to go down.
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Yep, that's right. However, I'd have assumed that as a case if the traffic decline took some time - because it's highly unlikely that all of the competition got strong links in just 1-2 days. The traffic decline started exactly on September 4.
 
OSS 117 said:
Google recently did an update for EMDs. The phrase "crazy engineers" may have been hit by the update.
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What's EMD? It wasn't the term 'crazy engineers' giving us the traffic. In fact we were ranked on the top for several diverse set of keywords.
 
Update - I've been told following is the 'right way' to do it. Can someone quickly confirm?

I also want to know where in wordpress should I add this code.

Code: 
function redirect_404_tags_wpse67077() {
    if ( is_tag() && is_404() ) {
        wp_safe_redirect( home_url('/'), 301 );
        exit;
    }
}
 
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'redirect_404_tags_wpse67077' );
 
TheBigK said:
Update - I've been told following is the 'right way' to do it. Can someone quickly confirm?

I also want to know where in wordpress should I add this code.

Code: 
function redirect_404_tags_wpse67077() {
    if ( is_tag() && is_404() ) {
        wp_safe_redirect( home_url('/'), 301 );
        exit;
    }
}
 
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'redirect_404_tags_wpse67077' );
Click to expand...
I was thinking htaccess....
 
TheBigK said:
Chris has helped me fix this by updating the code inside 404. It seems to be working fine. I'll write a detailed post once I get the traffic back.
Click to expand...

We just moved servers and noticed the same issues, what did you change in the 404, and is your traffic back up?
 
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