I’m really happy about a new experiment that we’re trying that has the potential to help a ton of site owners. A new blog post on the Google webmaster blog (you are subscribed to the webmaster blog, right? You’ll find at least as much good SEO and search-related info on that blog as on my blog) mentions that we’re alerting webmasters to vulnerable webserver software.

There’s been a recent trend of spammers hacking websites, and most of the time that happens because the webmaster or site owner didn’t update a piece of software that runs their website. If you think you can install a piece of software on the web in 2008 and run it forever without upgrading, I’m sorry to say that your website will be at much higher risk of getting hacked.

If you log in to the webmaster console and we think your website is running WordPress 2.1.1, you’ll soon see a message that looks like this:

I just want to emphasize that I have absolutely nothing against WordPress (I run it myself, like it a lot, and newer WordPress versions are much more secure than previous versions). We had to start somewhere, and this was just a natural first step so that we could try the experiment and see how well it works.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.