GWT Message - CMS Update Available
-
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?
-
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!
-
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?
-
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!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Update? Anyone seeing a drastic change in rankings?
Hey everyone, Has anyone seen a drastic change in clients Google Rankings, we have one which has dropped from 9.5% visibility to 5.4% in one month.. It's extremely worrying as I have never seen a drop like this before since I've managed the account, in fact rankings have increased month on month since we took over the account. I've also looked at google, no penalty showing, I've started removing spammy sites who link to us and also added no follow to some of the links on the site which linked out to try and keep some link juice in the site. Anything else I can try / do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unbranded_Lee2 -
Ecommerce catalog update: 301 redirects?
Hello mozers, We run an ecommerce store and are planning a massive catalog update this month. Essentially, 100% of our product listings will be deleted, and an all new catalog will be uploaded. The new catalog contains mostly new products, however there are some products that already existing in the old catalog as well. The new catalog has a bunch of improvements to the product pages, included optimized meta titles and descriptions, multiple language, optimized URLs and more. My question is the following: When we delete the existing catalog, all indexed URLs will return 404 errors. Setting up 301 redirects from old to new products (for products which existing previously) is not feasible given the number of products. Also, many products are simply being remove entirely. So should we go ahead and delete all products, upload the new catalog, update the sitemap, resubmit it for crawling, and live with a bunch of 404 errors until these URLs get dropped from Google? The alternative I see is setting 301 redirects to the home page, but I am not sure this would be correct use of 301 redirects. Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro130 -
Rankings drop from the new update
Hello, I've noticed some big ranking downs on important keywords, from the last Google update, and don't really know what seams to be the problem, but have an assumption. In April 2015 we had 3.000.000 pages indexed by Google, and 80% of them had duplicated content for about 90% of it. The site I'm talking about is http://nobelcom.com/. The duplicated content came from variations between calling from and calling to selections, because each of this selection was making a new url (ex. nobelcom.com/caling from/calling to). If "calling from" and calling to were the same country the url was nobelcom.com/calling-from, but after you chosen another calling to, the url become like the one in the example. To solve this I've decided to keep the nobelcom.com/calling-from urls and for different calling to country to display the content trough a javascript, because it was the same, it changed only the country names and the rates. I thought that this change will help us with the duplicate content, and still deliver our client what they are interested in, without affecting the UX, and also reducing the link juice dilution because we had 3.000.000 indexed by Google and most of them with no added value Can this be the reason for the drops? Now we have 590.000 pages indexed by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu1 -
Reviewing Category & Tag policy - Update
I recently (http://moz.com/community/q/less-tags-better-for-seo) started reviewing my category and tag policy, and things have been going very well. I thought I would share what I have done: Removed all tags from site Added unique descriptions for each post for the category excerpt. Only had the category description on the first page and use the description like a post to summarise and interlink to sub-categories or posts. This keeps pages from slipping down the number of clicks until it can be reached, improving link juice distribution. I also reduced the number of posts showing to 5, to allow more focus on the description (main part) of the category post. To add the category description on the first category page only in Wordpress, you need to go to the category.php or archive.php and change: to The overall aim was to have a hierarchal resource contained in the category page description. Whilst this is still a work in progress, you can see an example of what I am trying to achieve here: https://www.besthostnews.com/web-hosting-tutorials/cpanel/ https://www.besthostnews.com/web-hosting-tutorials/cpanel/mail/ If you have any further tips and advice as I continue to implement this (with good results so far), please feel free. Also, you can use the Visual Term Description Editor plugin to allow the wysiwyg editor for the category descriptions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheWebMastercom1 -
GWT - Links to website - Are they accurate
Hi I am looking at GWT more and more and I starting not to believe the information within it. For example we had a link on XYZ.com say 6 months ago. This link as been removed no reference to our website, however it still showing on GWT inbound links. I have noticed quite a few sites which have no relevance to our site. Is anyone else finding the information wrong in WMT
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Does having small ticket items (say under $1) available for customers to find & buy help or hurt our site?
I feel really silly asking this question to begin with, but... as a music store, we have a lot of "smalls" for products, like a guitar pick. We sell picks for $0.50 each, or a single clarinet reed at $0.79. Some believe this is too small, finicky, and cumbersome to have listed for sale on our site. To me, I wholeheartedly disagree with the notiion of excluding "smalls" for a plethera of SEO, customer service, & online SALES reasons... Also we offer USPS shipping to offer low shipping costs on small goods. Can I really be wrong about this? Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish1 -
Online Store With 4 Products Available in 50 Sizes, Need Tips Categories/Products
I own and manage 2 online stores selling furnace filters. http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com and http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ We have 4 different qualities furnace filters and each of them are avaible in almost 50 different sizes. My store is setup with almost 200 different products. ( 4 filtres X 50 sizes) None of them have variable. This was a lots of work to create 200 different products. The reason I did this is because when searching in search engine, vistors will use such keywords: 16x20x4 filter 20x25x2 furnace filter a/c filter 10x20x1 replacement filter online 20x20x1 16x25x5 filter toronto and so on... Must keywords request in search engine will included the furnace filter size. QUESTIONS: all my products descriptions are the same, the only difference is the filter size, is this Duplicate Content? will it be better to sell 4 filters with 50 variables? if my store use variable I don't see how I will rank on Google when shopper search for keyword like mention before in this post. My page name will always be the same. My description page the same and so on... Furnace Filters Canada is on BigCommerce platform and I love it. I'm in the process of moving Filtration Montreal to CoreCommerce. You can have a look at it here http://furnacefilter.corecommerce.com I'm very limited in SEO knowledge, the way I have setup http://furnacefilter.corecommerce.com I thing is the best way for SEO. What is your opinion & recommendations. Thank you for your help, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Are there certain times of the day that it is better to update content or blogs? How do I find out what time is best for a particular site?
Trying to figure out how to best optimize timing of new content... including blogs and other on page content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronSchinke0