The effort, announced by Google Oct.16, is a way for Google to warn Webmasters that their sites are vulnerable to hackers. According to Google, the test will focus on 5,000 to 6,000 Webmasters using Google Webmaster Tools and will notify them if they are using an old version of WordPress.

Google Webmaster Tools is a set of free products designed to help Webmasters make their sites more Google-friendly. For example, the tools can be used to provide metrics to show what the top queries are that are driving traffic to a site.

"WordPress generates meta tags on their site… and it basically just identifies the version of WordPress that the sites are running," explained Jay Nancarrow, a spokesperson for Google. "When we crawl those sites we're able to view those meta tags, and this is basically just an opportunity for us to give a heads-up to Webmasters … that they are running this version that has been identified as potentially having vulnerabilities."

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