The article in question getting indexed so fast and picking up some rankings certainly went against a couple of otherwise accepted and plausible facts within the industry. The first being you can't get indexed let alone ranked without some links to the page in question, well, a simple sitemap update via webmaster tools seems to work just fine.
The second relates to the age and trust of a resource and while I do believe that more often than not these rules still hold true, there is definitely an exception to the rules which brings about the whole FIFO question. Ok, yes it's a redundant question, but having worked with a lot of people in the industry it seems Google using FIFO stacks is a little discussed fact.
So what is FIFO you ask? It stands for "first in first out" and may also be referred to as FCFS (first come first serve), in short it means the early bird gets the worm! In essence, if a stack of resources are found that all more or less amount to the same thing, a first come first serve policy can be taken with how to best sort those resources in question. There is no doubt that all the usual processes are applied but it would seem that when a bunch of articles go live about a breaking topic, the FIFO stack method plays a much heavier hand in sorting results.
All other possible causes in the case of our article are non-existent, by that I mean the article has no links to the URL ranked, it was shared via our social networks but with a suffixed URL. The most surprising aspect of this is that our entire site had only been live about 9 days and the article itself only 4 days when it was picked up and ranked. So the site has no PR, no discernible trust rank and so on.
Unless shown otherwise we are pretty sure that the use of FIFO is very evident and effective in relation to breaking news or topics and on that note it definitely pays to keep your finger on the pulse and get in as soon as possible. We would very strongly recommend that you add any new pages to your sitemap and submit them ASAP, if you don't, who knows how long it may take for Google to find your nice new article.
Article by - Mark Asciak.