Google to Add Notification of Outdated Applications to Webmaster Toolsations

Google will soon begin sending messages via the Webmaster Tools alerting webmaster that “content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers”, and other web applications on their websites are out of date. This is an expansion of the alerts that Google began sending in October of 2008 to alert webmaster that they were running versions of applications that were known to contain security vulnerabilities.  The notification will be limited to applications that Google is able to determine the version that is on the website by parsing the source code of the website’s pages. While some applications, most notably WordPress, include this information there are many other high profile applications including Joomla and Drupal do not.  In their post announcing the feature, Google proposed that developers begin including a generator meta tag that includes the version number of the application in the web pages generated by the application.