Shorter URLs - Better in SEO?

[anand84]

This is something I have noticed recently among most of the popular websites. Let us say your inner page is about "How to make green widgets". Typically, I would have thought the URL would be www.example.com/how-to-make-green-widgets. That makes sense because this URL would respond to both the short keyword 'green widgets' as well as the long tail 'how to make green widgets'.

However, some popular websites are instead having their URL as www.example.com/green-widgets though the title is the long keyword kind.

Why is that? Is there any special benefit they derive here? I presume they are doing it deliberately because most of these websites are wordpress based, and Wordpress by default gets you the entire long tail in the URL.

[dertyfern]

URLs-with-to-many-hypens-look-really-spammy, is one reason I'd presume.

The other is simply because long urls aren't easy to remember, forward via email, et al.

[buckworks]

Relevant discussion here:

[webmasterworld.com...]