In addition to WikiHow getting tabbed answer boxes in the search results, they are also one of the sites sporting some new annotations in the Bing organic search results.  They are now displaying a “last updated” date, as well as the number of times an article has been viewed.

If you view one of the pages listed – I used the making marshmallows one as an example – the view count is being pulled from data on the page.  So this is overall view count and it is going by total page views, not Bing search click referrals.

This would be pretty nice for competitive analysis and topic ideas.  While you can view the view count on each individual page already, this change makes it very easy to do a quick scan in the search results to see precisely which articles were the most popular.

For example, here is a site search on Bing for they “SEO” keyword.

In this day of evergreen content, it is also important for webmasters to make it clear how fresh the content is.  While Google goes by the date written when it includes dates in the search results, the “last updated” date is pretty significant because it shows it has been checked since it was originally written.

Using the marshmallow article, Google’s result does not include any dates at all, making it unclear simply from looking at the search results how recently it was updated.

The last updated dates and view counts seem to be tied together, as I never saw a result with just one or the other, it was always both.

This is a test Bing is running.  I only saw it in one browser session but not another.  I only saw it for wikiHow results, although they could be appearing for other sites as well.

Added: It could also be very spammable.  Since Bing is only using wikiHow’s “word” on how many page views it has, if this becomes widespread it could definitely turn into an issue where webmasters inflate that view count to make an article seem much more popular than it really is.

We have definitely seen this happen when it comes to the number of reviews a website or product has that shows up in the search results, where a days old site will show thousands of reviews.