I have been shocked by how quickly content on some sites are picked up lately. An article I posted on Ezinearticles.com and our company profile on SEOmoz.com are examples of pages I have seen that within hours of getting something approved and live on the site the post was picked up.

This got me thinking…

A while back Aaron Wall mentioned using cache dates as the new Google PageRank.

I believe that.

Along that vein, search engines should spider sites more frequently that post new GOOD content, an easy concept. So for those of you asking me if setting up a script to pull a new press release everyday is a good idea the answer is still NO.

If you set google alerts to daily or weekly you may not get an indication of what sites have content that gets picked up most quickly.

Taking Aaron Wall’s concept one step further, a KEY component of being a good SEO is understanding link value, and if your client can write 1 article a quarter, which of the 1000 article sites should you submit your 4 to this year for them most bang for the buck?

If you are JUST using PageRank you could be way off.

I would recommend that you run tests on the top article sites (or any site for that matter), submit garbage and submit good stuff…see which ones let the garbage in…I would be willing to bet that the sites that have CRAP QA on article submissions are less likely to get their pages get in the index within 24 hours. The really strong ones do.

By running a test on how quickly a page gets in the index from hundreds of article sites you should be equipped to ensure that you get the articles in on sites that are seen as most credible (and authoritative) by the search engines.

If you set your Google Alerts to get notification as they happen you’ll see that some sites get picked up within hours of mentioning you…to me that says the site might be seen as more of an authority site than others that take longer. This is one way you could look at article submissions or any effort to gain authority links…if you order them based on time to get something indexed it should be one indicator to help you understand authority.

You can also do this using your Google reader if a site you are trying to get a link from has RSS.

I opened my reader and searched for some content from the most recent post which happened to be from SEroundtable. Notice it was posted 1 hour ago.

Now notice how long it took Google to pick it up – about 1 hour.

Competitive hint: Looking at the sites mentioning your competitors and getting picked up quickly is one way to prioritize which sites that link to your competitors should be targeted by your linking efforts.

I have not tested this strategy fully, so I would absolutely welcome some alternative points of view.