How important is the length of a URL?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  LionLeaf, LLC: In terms of an individual web page, there shouldn't be any specific reason why a longer URL would perform worse than a shorter one under most circumstances.  ;Provided that the URL is shorter than the maximum possible length (something like 1024 characters).
  
  However, when  ;it comes to the domain name, things can be a little bit more complex.  ;Google have rolled out a couple of recent updates which have devalued "exact match domains" (those which are made up specifically of the keywords that you're targeting).  ;They seem to have particularly concentrated on hyphenated domains, and if you look at the stats on mozcast.com, there's a definite downward trend in the number of EMDs that are ranking in the top 10 of Google.  ;There's a post on Search Engine Land that's worth reading about it:  ;http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340
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  Justin Y: I don't think it's about rank, it's probably more about the keyword position in the URL before the cutoff. I do think the url structure is important when it comes to ranking. For the domain, I think it's still best to keep that below 13 characters and out of the the two listed, I'd go with HPRealtyBrokers because its more brandable to me and looks less spammy. 
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  Ian Dixon: Agreed on the use of the shorter version +Justin Y ;though I think I would go further and shorten it to HPrealty.
  OK then the page needs to make it clear that we are talking about a broker otherwise the Feds come knocking.
  Just my 2c