that's understandable but google france has nowhere near the amount of possibilities for doing back links, white hat etc so just wanted to know if anyone has any search engine submission sites or any other tricks that have helped them. We're up there at the top but with a new site about to come on board I would like to figure out some other ways.
Well, using the *.fr cLTD is a good start for the domain extension, secondly hosting the web site in that region helps geo-targeting. Third use the geo-targeting tool in Google Webmasters Central to geo-target your search results.
Hello, I joined a French SEO contest few months ago and ranked #8 on g.fr and #3 on g.com. I explained my way here: http://www.pagasa.net/resultats-racheumeuneu.php Hope this helps. Feel free to PM me for further information. Cheers. Thibaut
This is an interesting question fo me also. Thibaut, I read your article thanks. One thing you didn't mention...were most of the links you got from other french language / .fr sites? Do you think that is important for ranking in google.fr? Also in google.fr do you think most people select to 'search the web', 'search francophone pages', or search 'pages: france' ? Cheers!
Hello M8, Most of my links came from non-english sites I was able to get here from DP users; in this case, I don't think this was very reliable as the word itself "Racheumeuneu" doesn't have a real semantic meaning. I guess Google considered it as a name and applied its default rules, ie english rules. But I own another french site where I built most of my links from English sites and it ranks very well too. Unlike what I expected, my idea is that G is much more flexible regarding links coming from foreign sites. (I mean English sites from my point of view By the way, many famous sites are multi-language, therefore this should cause some issues to G which should be more permissive regarding cross-language situations. To be clear, my answer is that getting links from foreign sites doesn't hurt your SERPS and helps ranking. But I guess G's scoring will be higher when you use the same language in your link-building campaign. And regarding your question, most people select 'search the web' in G.fr Cheers. Thibaut
Thibaut, thanks for the link to the article. I read the English version, I'll leave the French version to my husband . Very informative and although there were a few things I was aware of already, I picked up a couple of new ideas.
get links from sites with .fr domain extensions and from sites hosted in france....make sure your site is hosted in france....
For .fr It is very important your website content on loading should be in french,try to exchange link with french websites only
Have some if not all text in french as most users still search in their native language and get plenty of relevant backward links if possible from .fr sites.