Wanted to let people know about a problem we recently experienced with our Web site.
Our web site appeared that it went down this pass week. Google was notifying me that we had a soft 404 error. Never heard of a soft 404 before. I had been working last week on a warning that the site was blocked for indexing because of the robot.txt file, which made no since either.
It turns out that the person that hosts our website had activated a Google Page Speed App on the server. This app would blocked our web site from displaying and allowing Google to scan our site. It cause the site to show a blank white page. I could FTP into the site and see the files but the site would not run. The hosting provider said that this App only effected static sites and not CMS sites.
After much research my host provider figured out what was going on. It turns out you can not permanently turn off this App or uninstall it once it was enabled in the control panel for the server. He found special code that he was able to install on the Unix server to disable the App for each Website that was effected. He also found a code to remove the App but he is hesitant on applying this because he is afraid it may take down the servers effected.
Host provider was able to get everything working.
Google makes something you cant remove or back out of, then blocks everything from working. Sometimes I really hate how Google operates.
Ray
