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.

One of the things that makes SEO so fun is that there is sometimes no definitively right or wrong way to do things. There are few things that I enjoy more than a good debate with the team about the pros and cons of different strategies. Coming up with strategies to drive high-quality, long-term valuable links for our clients is one of our current areas of focus.

A little while ago, I ran across a site that, on its blog, asked people for a link in exchange for a $5 gift card. The blog would also link back to anyone who linked to them (can you say reciprocal link?). This immediately sparked debate internally. Some thought it was very smart – it was argued that the site is simply asking people who enjoy its services to link to them. I agree; I think it is a smart idea to get people who like your company to link to your site. However, I argued that there were some flaws in the execution.

I wouldn’t have made my request so public. Last year, Google started cracking down on paid links by asking people to report them. Honestly, if I was a competitor of this site and saw this, I think I’d consider reporting them. Whether this counts as “paid links” is sort of borderline, but when you’re in a competitive industry and someone isn’t playing by the rules, I’d let a third party (Google) decide.

To correct this, I’d take a much more “below-board” approach to this strategy. I wouldn’t put the linking request out there as a public post on my blog. I would recommend communicating with customers, communicating with Twitter followers, messaging people in Facebook, etc. The strategies that I would employ are ones like this. Sure, a competitor might catch wind of it and still report you, but at least you’re minimizing your risk. Why not first try to get maximum value while minimizing risk? And if that strategy doesn’t work, then think about going public. But the risk is huge – if you are reported and Google decides that this is against its policies, you’re putting your site and your revenue at risk.

Still, it’s a very grey area. What do you think? Would you consider this example link buying? How would you improve upon their strategy? Let the debate continue.