Just for your information:
I recently had an issue deploying a custom page layout. The error was the following:
Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls
It showed that it had something to do with the case of asp:content tags. The "C" needs to be in Upper case.
<asp:Content> instead of <asp:content>
I was lucky that I found this blogpost. Funny is that this post is already 6 years old :-)
http://blog.consejoinc.com/2009/01/sharepoint-page-layout-error-only.html
Cheers
Sven