I recently came across a document which highlighted a SEO strategy for a major UK based company. Now for legal reasons I can’t mention which company it is but they are huge in the UK and their industry is insurance.

Now I work on many clients but primarily the insurance sector, which is highly competitive and very lucrative if the rankings are achieved. Most of the clients I manage SEO for have achieved top 10 positions for their keywords but there are always a handful of websites that always sit on top, no matter what.

I have of course researched my competitors thoroughly, which everyone in SEO should do, looking at their design, backlinks, content, IP locations etc. At first glance all these elements look pretty standard, not much out of the ordinary – so it was a nice treat to see how these “top dogs” have managed this.

A huge network of at least 100 websites has been created; some websites date back to 1999 so this method has been used for a long time, and has really only started working perfectly for the last 12-18 months. Each of these websites is very high quality, most of them ranking in the top 5/10 for each niche. The niches aren’t limited to one or two either, they are quite varied.

The network is made up by at least 15 different IP addresses, each providing between 4-20 websites on each, the more important websites being hosted on IP’s with the least amount of websites or even on their own.

Paid links have been commonly used on most of these websites which has added to their individual values, but here’s the sneaky part. If a new website is added to this network (which probably pays an enormous amount of $$$) then no links are bought directly, instead the related sites on the network get the links they then link to the “new site”. This means with these high quality sites only having 2-4 outgoing links, the juice is massive!

Now I know that most companies have sub departments with additional websites but this method is taking it to the next level. Literally millions of $$$ have been spent on this network but for this one particular insurance company, that price must have been recovered in a few weeks.

It’s just worth noting that even “trusted” brands that have been around for many years might not always play nice when it comes to rankings and strategies.