GWT Message - CMS Update Available

[AaronHenry]

Howdy Moz,

Just received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about a CMS update:

"Joomla Update Available

As of the last crawl of your website, you appear to be running Joomla 1.5. One or more of the URLs found were:

http://www.website/custom-url/article5034

Google recommends that you update to the latest release. Older or unpatched software may be vulnerable to hacking or malware that can hurt your users. To download the latest release, visit the Joomla download page. If you have already updated to the latest version of Joomla, please disregard this message.

If you have any additional questions about why you are receiving this message, Google has provided more background information in a blog post about this subject."

Read through the associated blog post. According to the post a generator meta tag is created in Joomla that notes the CMS version. Here's the oddity:

The site was on Joomla 1.5 over 2 years ago. 1 Year ago it was updated to Joomla 2.5. About a week ago it was converted completely to Wordpress. According to GWT the last date the Google bot accessed the site was the day before (5/1/14) the email.

I went through the code, css/html, and the database and found no reference of Joomla 1.5.

Has anyone seen this message? If so, how did you rectify it? Were there any adverse effects on rankings?

[David-Kley]

Just wanted to add, no I don't think there would be any adverse effects on ranking, unless the site was compromised somehow. Since you are on a completely different system, you should be fine with a resubmission.

On a side note, since you are on WordPress now, make sure you have the right file permissions, and shell access turned off. Hackers love a WordPress site that is unprepared.

Best of luck with the new site!

[David-Kley]

Sounds like they have a super old page cached in their system. Do you have caching turned off in the new WordPress site? Most people turn it on, but I have found if you have gzip compression and css compiling turned on, it's not needed. To me, caching can create more headaches then solutions. (personal opinion)

You could also go into your webmaster account, and do a fresh "fetch as google" for the root domain,  and all linked pages. This way they will have the latest version of your site in their database. Google downloads your site so they can reference the content quickly for the search queries entered. Could be they are still on an old download. Have you ever resubmitted the site since you rebuilt it?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

You can check the cached version of that page to see what they have in the cache - is it a recent version of the page or something pretty old, and they haven't reindexed that page in a while.

Either way, I think these notices are more recommendations and helpful tidbits they think will assist webmasters than crucial information that will influence rankings. So if the message isn't relevant anymore, I would ignore it and move on building a great website for your visitors!