+1  A: 

Never mind. False alarm. In my Nokogiri task, I was pointing to a local copy of the page that included the anchors. The live page required a login, so when I browsed to it, I could see the a tags. Adding the login to the rake task solved it.

dwayne
Glad you found the solution :) Please mark the question as resolved by clicking on the tick next to your answer.
XaviEsteve