Last updated on June 28th, 2009
Many webmasters have been reporting in recent days they have had warnings appear in their Google Webmasters utility that reads “Invalid XML Tag. This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit. Parent tag: author”. Google has confirmed it as a bug.
It was first thought this bug only affected Blogger/Blogspot sites but Rusty Brick found them in other sites last Thursday and Friday but the bug is now gone.
In an announcement on their Webmaster Help Forum, Google said this message is simply “…informational and does not affect our parsing of your RSS feed for Sitemaps, nor does it affect your site’s crawling and indexing.”
A thread from a Google employee says you can safely ignore this message if you see it.