That might sound a bit dramatic but no, it does not. I've been doing some research (during the early hours of the morning) and I'm amazed at the number of websites out there adopting the most insane techniques in order to climb SERPs.

I must admit, I was intrigued by the methods at first. I mean, who wouldn't like to get a week's work done in a few minutes? :) But you know what they say, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is".

The biggest monster of all is the promise of instantaneous link share with thousands of quality websites. This basically involves joining a poorly code shabby directory which is copied many times over thousands of different domains. There's several things wrong with that:

1. These pages offer no quality content what-so-ever, so they'll never be highly regarded by SEs.

2. The number of outgoing links on each page means your site will get a minuscule tiny small fraction of absolute nothing - it really isn't much...

3. The same pages are duplicated over and over again around the web and are promptly ignored and penalized by SEs.

Now, if you're a SEO expert you will know that apart from being a gross waste of time, it's extremely unlikely that any of the above will harm your site's reputation. A webmaster has no control over external links to his website(s), and for that reason his website(s) will not be penalized by the SEs, contrary to popular belief. In fact, these techniques may well fool small search engines* and quickly push a website up the ladder on SERPs.

Having said that, here's the big whopper....

4. The most common requirement for these link-share wonders is that, of course, you place yet another copy of the directory and its thousands of badly coded content-less pages under your website.

This is a huge problem and is where many people go wrong. And here's why:

• Adding thousands of pages to your website overnight will dramatically affect your content's keyword density. SEs like Google don't only examine an individual page, they also analyse the website as a whole in order to determine its 'theme'.

• Whereas incoming links cannot harm your websites(s) reputation, outgoing links can destroy it - very quickly. A link to a page is seen seen as a 'vote of confidence' to that page and its content from the website linking into it. Linking into bad neighbourhoods and low quality websites will damage your reputation - (ie.: SERPs rankings).

This all sounds very depressing... so what can you do?

The most effect form of link sharing is and will always be one-way incoming links.

And the best way to get that is by having quality content.

And the best quality content should be found on your website.

Although traditional methods can be time consuming, you simply cannot go wrong. One week of quality content publishing is worth a million times more than every automatic FFA link directory that has ever existed ever.

• Small search engines - Anything other than Google, Yahoo, MSN and the likes...