Everyone is talking about @wpbeginner collapse. 2.6M monthly clicks down to 27K. A 99% wipeout. In a recent YouTube video, @edwardeachday pointed to what many people are blaming: “Too promotional.” “Too much fluff.” “They ranked their own plugins #1 everywhere.” I don’t think that’s the full story. So I ran WPBeginner through EEATClean. I scanned only 30 articles out of their 3,000+. The result? 29 were hurting the site. 24 should probably be deleted. 5 needed serious updates. Only 1 was worth keeping. And if 30 random articles look like that… Imagine what the other 3,000 look like. The real problem may not be promotion. It may be outdated information. And the data is brutal 👇 Example 1: “WordPress 3.3.1 – Security Update, Upgrade Now.” Published in 2012. Still live in 2026. Still telling readers to install a WordPress version that is now ancient and full of security risks. Score: 12/100. Risk: 8/10. And here’s the kicker: No archive notice. No “this is outdated” disclaimer. No noindex. It’s still fully indexed and presented like fresh, valid content. So Google may read it as a current signal of the site’s expertise. Example 2: A tutorial about getting logged-in user information. The whole tutorial is built around get_currentuserinfo(). That function was deprecated back in 2016. So the code simply doesn’t work anymore. Here’s the real story: A WordPress tutorial site lives or dies on one thing: Is the information still accurate today? WordPress moves fast. Functions get deprecated. Versions become security risks. Methods break. Interfaces change. WPBeginner built thousands of tutorials over more than a decade. But a huge share of those tutorials now describe dead code, risky versions, and steps that no longer match reality. When a reader follows a tutorial and it doesn’t work, trust breaks. They bounce. Google reads those signals across thousands of pages. Self-promotion in small doses is survivable. A decade of decaying tutorials is not. Everyone focused on the plugins because they are visible. But the real killer was invisible: Thousands of pages quietly going out of date. Still indexed. Still ranking. Still treated as current. I scanned just 30 articles with EEATClean. It scans every article and shows exactly: What’s outdated. What needs fixing. What should be removed. What needs to be added. Because old content isn’t neutral. Every outdated tutorial tells Google your expertise expired.

@aeljaouari @wpbeginner @edwardeachday Let's face it - this is because Google's AI overview and nothing else. Google itself would know that an article from 2012 about a software version is outdated and it would not show it in search or use it in rankings.

Google doesn’t need to know every article is outdated, because users know. When they land on a tutorial and the code doesn’t work, the ui is different, or the version is ancient, they bounce. And when that happens across thousands of indexed pages, Google eventually sees the pattern. So yes, AI overviews reduce clicks, but they don’t explain ranking drops. Inaccurate and outdated content kills trust.

Except the 'landing on outdated tutorial' doesnt happen - Google has been deprioritizing non-evergreen content since a long while now, and an article about a software version from 2012 has no way of appearing in search unless the user specifically searches for it. As a result, there is no reason for google to penalize them. It has been able to just ignore low quality backlinks since a long while ago, so it's certain that it can just ignore non-evergreen content that is way too old.

That’s the key difference: WPBeginner isn’t mainly news/non-evergreen content. It’s mostly evergreen WordPress tutorials. And with tutorials, Google may not instantly know the information is no longer accurate, but users do. For example, if a tutorial tells people to use a deprecated WordPress function, they follow the steps, the code fails, and they bounce. Over time, if that happens across many indexed pages, Google can read the user experience pattern and lose trust in the site. The issue isn’t old content. It’s evergreen content that became inaccurate.

My experience has been that while there may be a few outdated things in the average WPBeginner article, the tutorial itself works. This is no different than the rest of the content google shows. As a result I don't think it's a differentiator. And let's face it - WPBeginner isn't the only site experiencing this kind of traffic drop. So it can't be rankings.