Google conducted its third online webmaster chat on October 22nd 2008 and answered some of the tricky questions. Here are the important questions answered by Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye among others. Definitly this will help to improve your site rank.

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.

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.

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: Hey Scott, I’m not trying to give you the run around, but this is a bit situation specific… overall, though, 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. Good luck!

For SEO, I’d like to improve my rankings by removing technical obstacles (starting with dynamic URL parameters), what are the most important site fixes to make and how can I document before and after success metrics using the Google Webmaster Tool?
JohnMu: To check the crawlability of your site, I would recommend crawling your site with a crawler like Xenu’s Link Sleuth (freeware, for Windows). Doing that gives you a rough look at how search engines view your site and can point you towards areas where crawlers get stuck in a loop or start crawling duplicates based on the URL parameters.

What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?
Nathan J: I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site.

Many believe that to rank well, you simply need “quality” backlinks. But how important is having your keywords in the , and throughout your site? Is keyword density of any importance to show what the page is about? What % is suggested?
Wysz: Links are just one factor involved in Google’s ranking of pages. We look at both on-page and off-page content, so what you have on your page can be an essential part of ranking. However, there is no recommended “keyword density.” Your content should be high quality and written for users. If you try writing for search engines, the language can become very unnatural, which may end up hurting you more than it helps.

How will social media or more specifically share of comments (buzz about a brand) influence the serps?
Maile Ohye: Hi egarolera, social media is great! But, there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.
A few things to note:

If you allow user-generated content on your site, remember to monitor for spam.
Also, if you’re looking to get buzz to directly help your site in SERPs, know that we normally don’t crawl javascript, so if it’s hosted in javascript you’ll still get the user traffic from the buzz (which can eventualy lead better rankings), but the user comments themselves won’t be indexed.
If you want to get the user-generated content associated with your site (as part of your URLs), then make sure you host the user-generated content on your domain (so it’s not link to a separate site). Thanks, egarolera!