Google Wants to Help Make Sure You’re Secure

Posted by jonathan at 2:11pm EST on 10/16/2008

Google’s own Matt Cutts recently posted an article about how Google is helping you stay secure.

To kick off the security enhancement efforts by Google, they are focusing on WordPress, the same software that powers this blog and the same software that I recently hosted a conference about; WordCamp NY.

Here is an example of what the security notices will look like,

I think this is a great feature to have for Google and its webmasters, but the only concern I have is: how scalable is it?

I really do not see this being scalable with the number of different platforms out there, the number of different versions available, and frequent the release cycle is for each platform. It’s just not realistic, in my opinion, for Google to even try to stay up with the different versions.

They are starting this service using a very old version of WordPress, 2.1.1. Sure, they’re using an older version because hopefully there isn’t anyone running on it anymore because it’s insecure, but I really don’t understand their motive to even try to make this scalable.

A majority of people that are smart enough to authenticate their site to Google’s Webmaster Center is also probably just as smart enough to keep their install up to date.

Of course I realize people may have dozens of sites and just forget to upgrade one of them, so this would be great for them. But on a larger scale, I don’t see this being a huge service to everyone as a whole.