How to Refresh Old Blog Posts With Intro Summary Boxes
As part of my push to revive a dead blog, I stumbled upon recommendations to add summary boxes at the start of articles.
In a way, these summaries check a lot of, pardon the pun, boxes when it comes to refreshing old blog content- they can have a few hundred words and be a “substantial” update, they are immensely quotable by AI Overviews and LLMs, you can sneak some affiliate links in for users who may bounce, and, perhaps most importantly, adding them into an article also gives you a chance to re-read old content and do more updates further down the page, too.
So in this one, I thought I'd share more about my approach for using summary boxes to refresh old blog posts!
5 Things to Know Switching a Private Facebook Group Public
In late 2025, Facebook announced that private Facebook groups would have the opportunity to switch to public for the first time.
This was music to my ears, as my private Facebook group had grown substantially in recent years, from just a few thousand followers when I initially switched it to private to over 140k followers at the time of writing this article.
But despite the announcement, the rollout of private groups going public was neither instant nor uniform, and larger groups seemed to not get the option until much later. It wasn't until June 2026 that I had the opportunity to switch my group to public, and after consulting with our own private Facebook group here at This Week in Blogging, I made the leap as the positives seemed to outweigh any potential negatives I was worried about.
So in this one, I thought I would share some observations of what happened after the switch to help those who may be considering doing the same.
5 Ways to Update Old Blog Content for More Traffic in 2026
Over the last few years, my nearly 18-year-old travel blog has been through hard times. After hitting a peak of about 100,000 pageviews per month in 2019, between COVID and algorithm updates, we saw our traffic dwindle to as low as 4,712 pageviews per month in May 2025- a traffic figure we hadn't seen in nearly 15 years.
To call that depressing would be an understatement.
But in late 2025, I realized that I had nothing left to lose (literally), and decided to treat my travel blog as a test subject for playing around with new update ideas and, over time, we started seeing some encouraging signs!
By November, we had traffic up to over 10,000 pageviews per month for the first time in a year-and-a-half, and by May 2026, just one year later, we were on track to hit 22,000 pageviews per month- a figure we hadn't seen in over two years and just shy of our goal of 25,000 to apply for Raptive.
So in this one, we wanted to share a few of the things we've tested that appear to be working for us right now, and then bring it all together for an analysis of why it may be all of these working together just as much as any individual change.
Stay22's New Dashboard is Here – Take a Look at the Features
This article was sponsored by Stay22.
We've been big fans of Stay22 for many years now, as the affiliate network has completely overhauled our earnings thanks to their many partners and novel products.
One of Stay22's latest updates trends to the analytics and functionality side, with a complete overhaul of their dashboard hub!
So let's take a look at some of the new features you'll find in the hub, and highlight a few components we are most excited about.
How to Use Schema Markups for SEO and GEO
Ever since AI Overviews were launched, SEO experts immediately started to dig in and try and figure out how they work. This gave rise on a new variant of the industry, aptly named as GEO- or Generative Engine Optimization.
Although this is still in its infancy, so much so that I am not personally prepared to make any definitive statements on what “works” just yet, one element has come up in conversation from many independent sources whose advice I trust- structured data is becoming immensely important.
One way bloggers can add more structured data to their sites, that AI crawlers may pick up on, is through an older code type known as Schema Markups. Many bloggers ignored these for decades because, well, they weren't entirely necessary when keywords could do the trick. But with more and more AI tools growing and using structured data as its backbone, it is becoming a critical tool in the GEO arsenal.
So I dove down into research and set up a test using my own sites as the subjects. In this one, I wanted to break down a bit more about what Schema markups are, how I used AI to generate my own code, and share a bit of the results I'm seeing so far as they are, admittedly, a fair bit encouraging!
Disclaimer: In my guides, I usually like to produce content only on topics that are easily repeatable (e.g. do X, Y, Z, and wait to see if you have results like mine). Schema Markups are not easily repeatable. In a way, the steps I took in this one falls under the new notion of “vibe coding”- using AI to develop code in an iterative process to reach a mostly good, but not perfect, end goal. This article is not perfect. You will run into trouble along the way. Treat this as a starting point, because, to be honest, even with my best instructions, it is almost impossible to get AI to recreate this code verbatim. So use these steps and start testing. But let me be the first to say, I consider this one to still be quite risky and prone to error.