Can people's names be added to a URL slug?

Question

On webpages generated from user generated content, I create slugs for the URLs based on the title (just like Stack Overflow does):

http://www.example.com/photo/day_at_park

If there's more than one slug "day_at_park", I'll append a count:

http://www.example.com/photo/day_at_park,2

Does it make sense to include, in this example, names of people involved in the content? So if it was a photo of Susan and Bob, the URL might be:

http://www.example.com/photo/day_at_park,susan_surandan,bob_smith

One benefit is far fewer chances of needing to append a count like the second example above. The URLs also are more descriptive about the core parts of the content.

On the downside, the URLs are clearly longer. And I have to introduce more ugly commas (though better than - or _). If, in the above example, there are many people in a photo… I would have to cut down the slug size by removing people… that seems inappropriate, basically attributing more SEO importance to arbitrary people.

Answer 1

1. You're over-valuing the "keyword in the url" impact for SEO purposes. Yes, all other things being equal having keyword may assist (they'll be useful to your visitors).
2. Don't use underscores in URLs. Just don't.
3. Don't use commas in URLs. Just don't. Hypenating the URL with -2 is much better.
4. Length of the URL is also not a radically large factor - except when you're differentiating 30 characters vs 230...