you said you want to build only .fr links but yet you have added .fr to the "skip sites with the following words in url/domain filter" that means sites with .fr in url/domain will be skipped which goes against what you wanted. ;;)
@young_gooner - If you put the "!" in front of the domain extension like !.fr - it will work as a reverse filter so instead of filtering out those domains, it will only post to those domains.
I think u r missing out on allot of potential link. From the above i assume you want to build only links on French websites.
But with the assumption that all French websites end with .fr is wrong, because i am sure there are many French websites using .com, .co. , .france , and I am sure many social sites, web 2.0's in French are not .fr, and many other.
Would you not be better off to use the language filter ?. in which case it would only work if the site owners specified the meta tags <<font color="#993366"><font color="#800000">meta</font> </font>name="<font color="#000080">language</font>" content="french">
Another option would be to exclude sites by country, but that option will not work because i think it is based on where the domain ip resolves to, and i am pretty sure that all French sites are hosted in France.
Another option and what is maybe a easier and safer option is only use global list which you are 100% sure is from French sites, and then use the GSA Ser, search engines and select only French search engines.
What you're saying is obviously true, but I also kind of understand what the OP is trying to achieve (even though he might be ignorant about the exact technical underlying factors).
Since I'm targetting both the Dutch (NL) and Belgian (NL) market I'm in a somewhat unique position to clarify. As you might know a bit more than 60% of the Belgians speak Dutch, so it's pretty tempting to increase your site's target size by ranking in both google.be (NL part obviously) part as well as google.nl.
Now the problem is it's pretty darn hard to get good rankings in google.be if your domain has a .nl extension and vice versa. In contrast ".com/net/org" ltd's are relatively easy to rank in both Google's. It's pretty obvious Google sees them as universal extensions (duh!). This is only at the domain level and nothing mind blowing really.
Were it does get interesting is while ceteris paribus (all other factors being the same) .nl extensions are harder to rank in google.be than .be, I observed that it is also the extensions in the backlink profile that are incredibly important. For example, I can throw a huge amount of high quality .nl backlinks to my .nl site, but it just won't rank as well in google.be as some mediocre .be backlinks. Mind you, this is not just based on my numerous observations, but it's also common knowledge in the Dutch SEO community.
From Google's standpoint it's also pretty logical to give own country ltd's more importance since:
1) .be extensions are more likely to be targeted toward Belgians
2) there are many more Dutch .nl than .be websites which interlink (linkjuice), so without the attenuation of .nl domains you'd get the strange occurence of (translated example) police.nl showing up above police.be in google.be.
I'm not in a position to extrapolate this to other countries. One of the reasons of this being a pretty unique situation of two countries speaking the same language, but it's definitely something to think about.
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From the above i assume you want to build only links on French websites.
But with the assumption that all French websites end with .fr is wrong, because i am sure there are many French websites using .com, .co. , .france , and I am sure many social sites, web 2.0's in French are not .fr, and many other.
Would you not be better off to use the language filter ?. in which case it would only work if the site owners specified the meta tags
<<font color="#993366"><font color="#800000">meta</font> </font>name="<font color="#000080">language</font>" content="french">Another option would be to exclude sites by country, but that option will not work because i think it is based on where the domain ip resolves to, and i am pretty sure that all French sites are hosted in France.
Another option and what is maybe a easier and safer option is only use global list which you are 100% sure is from French sites, and then use the GSA Ser, search engines and select only French search engines.
well if you want to rank in Netherlands but not Belgium -- you could select:
That should get rid of the Belgium sites