A couple of weeks ago there was a Google Webmaster Chat. Here is the summary along with my commentary. Nothing too deep here, but some good stuff to review.

Question: What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it’s search placement?

Matt Cutts: In the majority of cases, it actually doesn’t matter – we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information. Especially if you’re a mom/pop site, we try to find ways to rank your site even if your site is newer or doesn’t have many links. I think it is fair for Google to use that as a signal in some circumstances, and I try never to rule a signal out completely, but I wouldn’t obsess about it.

Did Matt really say this? I don’t have to give any testing results to show that this information is not accurate. There is “The Google Sandbox”, the “Honeymoon Period” and many other factors. The main issue is, it isn’t based on when the site was registered, but rather when Google first indexed the page.

So, before you pay a lot of money for that aged domain name, check the indexed date, which you can check the approximate date with the Way Back Machine.

Question: Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?

Matt Cutts: There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Actually, according to testing, Google has discounted directory submission since March. One example is Business.com. A listing in that directory carries the same amount of weight a directories costing 1/10th the fee Business.com charges. I will be updating my directory list just after I get back from PubCon.

Question: Can you explain how the use of sub-domains helps / hurts a site’s ranking?

Matt Cutts: Good question–do mean in terms of subdomains vs. subdirectories?

I asked the to Matt at PubCon last year and he basically said that years ago subdomains were treated as a separate domain. This was a big push for SEO, but Matt says that Google treats subdomains now as the same domain. While Matt may say that, there is still strong evidence in the SERPs that subdomains are counting as separate domains and allowing for one site to have multiple listings in the Top Ten.

Personally, I recommend using subdirectories instead of subdomains for usability and maintenance.

Question: Since Google is against using ranking software (ie:WebCeo) to monitor SERP rankings, is there any plans on Google creating an approved, in-house rank check application that webmasters can use?

Matt Cutts: It’s something that we’ve talked about. My concern is that sometimes people get too worried with paying attention to their “trophy phrase” and want to rank for that even if that’s not the best phrase for them, or concentrating on one phrase to the exclusion of all the other stuff they rank for isn’t the best idea. I think paying attention to server logs or analytics data gets you a really nice array of keywords that are practical to work on. But this is feedback that we’ve heard, and personally I think it would be nice if we offered this for some reasonable size of keywords.

Webmaster Tools already shows the ranking for the top keywords for the site, but there isn’t way to add addition keywords to track. This wouldn’t be difficult to add in my view and instead of being “concerned” with how people might use or “game” the system, you simply cancel any account that violates the Terms of Use.

Question: Do inbound links from other sites owned by the same company help or hurt rank?

Matt Cutts: I find that inbound links from the same company tend to break down into two camps. You’ll find mom/pops that have a very few sites in one camp, and that can make sense if those sites are linked; in the other camp, I’ve see SEOs have 1000 or 2000 different domains and cross-link them. I definitely would not recommend that.

I think a lot of the litmus test in my mind is whether it makes sense to a regular person for those domains to be interlinked. If you look at a product like Coke, people aren’t surprised to see that they have coca-cola.co.nz and several other domains. If you go to coke.com, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask users which country they’re coming from, and then send them to one of a bunch of domains. But if a regular user lands on example.com and finds 20 or 30 cross-links at the bottom of the page and they look like off-topic or cookie-cutter or spammy domains, that’s going to look bad to almost anyone.

Maile Ohye: I wouldn’t look at these links as helping or hurting your rank when written in a helpful manner to the user. So, if you run a sporting goods site, and you link to your sister companies for camping and tailgating equipment, that’s good for the user. More happy users can lead to more buzz, leading to better rankings.

If your sister companies are just linked at the footer of the page, in hopes of cross-advertising or getting more links, it’s not likely to add value to ranking or the user. In extreme cases, if it’s a bad neighborhood, these links will certainly not help you.

Put yourself in the user’s seat, and do what makes sense for these links.

I have tested this a lot and as long as you don’t go overboard there is no risk.