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Thanks jeff-rackaid.com.

The idea of some sort of fowl play did cross our minds.  These errors seemed to appear out of the blue without any significant code changes on our side.

We have done a fetch as Googlebot on a number of pages.  We had found that the returns have been inconsistent; we would fetch a particular page and get a "Not found" error one minute and then a "complete" result the next minute.  I don't think this is a normal activity.

We've also been tracking the traffic of Googlebot to our site and since Thursday (8/14), the hits from GoogleBot have been going down while the hits from an "unknown bot" have been increasing.

We have a problem that just came up out of the blue with Google, in particular Webmaster Tools & our Merchant Center.  We're getting a 404 errors for 1000s of pages in both of these applications, but the pages are working just fine.  Our shopping campaigns have been hit hard as many of our top products have been suspended from our merchant feed.  Webmaster tools is giving us 1000s of 404 errors to product & category pages alike. But every page returning a 404 error is working.  We've contacted Google and they mention that they are not getting a 404 error, but their crawler seems to be.  Has anyone ever experienced this?  What could be causing this?

Thanks for any input.