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I was hoping that wasn't going to be the part of that reply you focused on!

Honestly, I don't think that there is a single "go to" directory that I would use for every project. The ones that have value are those that are valuable resources that just happen to be in directory format. The common themes are that they are likely to be hand curated, tricky to get in to and cover one particular niche. They will also often form part of a larger site that has a user base that actually uses that directory.

I think this is different:

offering customers discounts for adding links to their site to Overstock.com.

That is straight forward link buying.  "I'll give you X if you link to me" isn't the same as "I see you have a page about X. We do that!".   It's a good example of what to be cautious of though.

Your A records are served up by DNS servers around the web.  There is no conditional rules in the system that can say "for france resolve www.mydomain to ip#1 and for spain resolve the same to ip#2".

You can have es.mydomain pointing to 1 ip and fr.mydomain to another of course. I don't think that is what you mean though.