long hyphenated page urls

is it better to keep it simple?

[Monkscuba]

Our site is doing just fine, and I like to keep page urls simple, like www.mysite.com/bluewidgets.htm

I notice a competitor has some ridiculously long hyphenated urls like www.his-site.com/widgets-colour-blue-widget-location-country.htm - Some are up to 12 hyphenated words!

In my opinion it looks stupid, but I guess there must be some search engines which give some credit to words in the url. My competitor obviously thinks it gives a big boost, though I reckon it's way down the list of important factors.

What d'yall think?

[2by4]

It's way down the list of important factors, and if taken to the extreme may actually hurt. Don't worry about it, that's not what's making him rank.

[Monkscuba]

Not worried, we mostly outrank them anyway, but you know sometimes you just want to squeeze all the juice from the lemon.

[2by4]

Oh, I know, I do the same thing, it doesn't hurt to hyphenate reasonably, like /widgets/red-widgets.htm, but I think excess may actually hurt since it's a sort of spam sign, or can be. I seem to remember google downgrading excessively hyphenated domain names, can't remember reading anything on file/folder names, but to me, anything that is obviously used to spam will one day be part of an algo to downgrade your page in the serps, so I tend to avoid it, except for fun stuff...