Continuing from yesterday …

Question: Will Webmaster Tools ever give us an option to “disassociate” from sites that link to us? This feature exists in Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but not Webmaster Tools.

Matt Cutts: So far because we work really hard to make it so that one site can’t hurt another site, we haven’t really offered this. It’s something that people have suggested and we’ve thought about though. Part of the challenge would be if a site owner wanted to disassociate a bunch of links from their site. If you have a ton of links pointing to your site, scanning all of them would get really tiring. So that’s a challenge, and since we haven’t seen a need for it yet, that’s why we haven’t offered it yet.

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.