can 2 open anchors kill a crawl of a site?

open anchor tags resulting in pages dropping out of Google index

[slashtilde]

hello - Noticed a peculiar situation that might account for drop in traffic: 2 opening anchor tags at the very beginning of the page (and only 1 closing tag). Unfortunately, this was part of a template syndicated across many pages so the bad HTML was systematically propogated.

Am still seeing same volume of pages in index and continued crawl of the site; however, i'm wondering if Googlebot could choke on this kind of error or what other signs i might look for to see if there is [no] issue.

thanks in advance,
~/

[trinorthlighting]

Yes, I think googlebot would score the page low. Fix the issue now that you know about it.

W3C validation would catch these simple errors... It might be wise to start validating the whole site...

[chrisgtl]

YES! I had two open anchors and the site drop tremendously because of it. Within a couple days of fixing tag problem, site was back up to levels before drop.