HTML Encoding Error

[MikeRoberts]

Okay, so this is driving me nuts because I should know how to find and fix this but for the life of me cannot. One of the sites I work for has a long-standing crawl error in Google WMT tools for the URL /a%3E that appears on nearly every page of the site. I know that a%3E is an improperly encoded > but I can't seem to find where exactly in the code its coming from. So I keep putting it off and coming back to it every week or two only to wrack my brain and give up on it after about an hour (since its not a priority and its not really hurting anything). The site in question is https://www.deckanddockboxes.com/ and some of the pages it can be found on are /small-trash-can.html, /Dock-Step-Storage-Bin.html, and /Standard-Dock-Box-Maxi.html (among others). I figured it was about time to ask for another set of eyes to look at this for me. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[TakeshiYoung]

Where are you seeing the error in Webmaster Tools?

If it's in the Crawl Errors section, you can click on one of the links and click the "Linked From" tab, which will show you what pages are linking to the malformed link. A lot of times these will just be external scraper sites that are just linking to your site improperly.

[MikeRoberts]

The page is being linked from only internal pages on the site not from any outside websites or scraper. Some of the pages WMT says the incorrect page is being crawled from are listed above.

[ThompsonPaul]

This is a bit of a long shot, Mike, but it's such a weird error that long shots might pay off

On your code around line 769 you have a horizontal rule inserted, which has an extra, unneeded "/" before the final ">" of the tag. I can only assume that Googlebot is thinking that's an attempt at a relative URL?

Cart is empty

*** * ***   **//This may be the problem?

• View cart

• Checkout

You wouldn't have noticed it as the horizontal rule is still appearing as expected.

Like I said, long shot, but since the cart appears on nearly every page, that could explain it.

Dying to know if that's it, so lemme know either way?

Paul

[Highland]

in XHTML(which he's using) and HTML5, it is proper formatting to add a closing slash to tags that don't have a closing tag. So br, hr, input, etc. all need that closing slash.

[MikeRoberts]

Sorry, I wasn't getting email notifications that people had answered. I checked with our remaining coder who said that was there on purpose (much like Highland stated) and he's going to take a look deeper into it once he has the chance but doesn't know why its showing up like that.

[TakeshiYoung]

I did a Screaming Frog crawl of your site, but didn't see any malformed links. Maybe it was a temporary issue that just hasn't been cleared from Google's cache.

[MikeRoberts]

Could be, I suppose. But it's been happening on and off for months now. I just mostly stop caring after a bit, clear out the errors and get annoyed when I see it pop up again. Its one of those things that doesn't actually cause a problem but I can't help feeling irked by its existence. All in all, I'm perfectly fine with the solution being "Google is wrong, leave it alone"... that's basically what I've been doing anyway.