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Google Notifications for Software Upgrade Now In Webmaster Tools

by Mathdelane on November 21, 2009

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

It has been a year since Google started providing alerts to webmasters for security holes in their websites that makes it vulnerable to attacks. In fact, the message center within Webmaster tools became their avenue in spreading the word to website owners with potentially hackable sites.

This time around, Google will not only isolate potentially vulnerable software packages, but also notify webmasters about the most recent version releases of the software packages or plugins they’re running on their site which would help webmasters to make informed decisions if they would want to upgrade or not. These notifications will be visible via the message center.

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Google sees appending a generator meta tag to specify the software version number help in parsing source code pages that Google will crawl to identify vulnerable sites. Difference in opinions question the security of placing version number in source codes for fear that once worm writers knew it; they would know the type of exploit a website can be susceptible but Google thinks otherwise.

Google blog mentions sending out the first of these messages soon so watch out for it.

Suggested for further reading:

  1. Secure Your Blogs: Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.5 Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes Just recently, the blogosphere had been targeted by malicious hackers that affected a lot of blogs and created so much hiatus that its effect was felt on Twitter. I have experienced this scenario since 2.7 and for those who blogged earlier than I do,...
  2. Does Google Pagerank Convert Money? Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes The day before Halloween, Google caught webmasters by surprise by secretly updating Pagerank. Google Pagerank is probably the metric most webmasters go crazy for and mostly advertisers run after to plot their link building strategies. The importance of this metric has been a long...
  3. Site Speed Matters in 2010, More Caffeine from Google Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes Google Engineer Matt Cutts has revealed to WebProNews in Vegas where Google is heading and believe it or not, he said that the Algorithm update or Caffeine will go live after the end of the holidays so as not to upset webmasters from any...

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