Will Google crawl links with other nested HTML elements?

Question

I have a link like this

<a href="/some/relative/link">
  <div class="container">
    Some Content
  </div>
</a>

On the Google Search Console, it says that some/relative/link is unknown to Google. It's been just under a day since the homepage was crawled and indexed, and I've submitted the homepage for indexing again about 12 hours ago, as the site changed. Will these URLs get crawled at some point, or should I reformat it to make it easier for Google to crawl?

The reason I have a div inside the anchor tags is that I'm displaying products that you can click on that redirect you to the product page, and I'm using links so that way Google can find these product pages. They are standalone pages that you can visit without needing any cookies.

I do have links that send this message "Cannot GET /about-us", could this stop crawling?

Answer 1

If you are using HTML5 then your link around a div is perfectly valid. See Is putting a div inside an anchor ever correct?

Regardless of what is valid, Googlebot is very aggressive about finding and crawling URLs from HTML whether the HTML is valid or not. Googlebot even scans JavaScript code for srtrings that it thinks look like links and it will crawl those. Bottom line is that Google engineers have programmed Googlebot to find as many links as possible. It is very unlikely that Googlebot wouldn't be finding a href in an anchor tag just because that anchor tag contains a div.

Your problem is much more likely to be time. Google can take days or weeks to update its database after doing a crawl. I generally suggest waiting two weeks before thinking there is a problem because of stale data in Google Search Console.