Very long URL

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

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  Neil Cheesman: The ONLY reason for changing is the url... which currently is essentially the title of the original post plus a post number - as that is the permalink structure due to publishing news items. A `PAGE` would be a simple url without any numbers "/xxx-guide" rather than /1234/10-tips-for-buying-xyd/ - and it is "xxx guide" that the page could rank for and get more traffic
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  Ammon Johns: Well, the one thing I would definitely avoid is recreating the post without removing the old one. Creating near duplicate content doesn`t create any actual penalty, but its bad practice, it makes loyal readers feel you`ve run out of ideas, and it splits visits, while not adding anything particularly new or meaningful save a `fresh post` and another URL.
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  Ammon Johns: 1. A lot of people really rate them, but in reality they are like a sugar rush. A few months on they are worthless - simply because there is a never ending, infinite stream, and their value is in identifying `trends` and `burstiness`. 2. There are literally hundreds of signals and factors used either raw, or in combinations, in the algorithms. Even the strongest factors then are never more than at most 2% of the final weight, and even that is higher than likely. URLs carry a number of signals, some relating to depth of page within a site, some relating to overall ontology, and of course, whether or not they contain specific or related keywords. Maybe 1%. But for an individual factor, 1% is actually significant, comparable to Titles. 3. depends partly on the exact topic, as some topics are known to demand freshness (QDF - Query Demands Freshness) while others are known to be more research based, where answers may stay the same for decades. In links it matters more, and especially with the infinite stream of social media links.
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  Neil Cheesman: The questions are I guess threefold. 1. How much weight do the social shares carry? 2. How much weight does the structure of the url carry? 3. How much weight does age matter? (there may be other factors - answers on a postcard)
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  Neil Cheesman: I guess I could also create a new xxx guide with new content and leave the current one - current post gets VERY little traffic...
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  Ammon Johns: You _could_ start afresh, but why not simply update the existing post, adding in some more recent additions (and some extra content)?
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  Roger Montti: The URL doesn`t matter in terms of helping it rank better. But if it makes you feel better you CAN change the URL to whatever you want and the redirect the old one to the new one, thus retaining whatever ranking equity you believe the page has. That`s what I`m doing to one of my own sites.
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  Jim Munro: My thoughts are along the same lines as Ammon Johns and Jeremy L. Knauff but the reason I`m chiming in is to say that rather than create a new page on the same subject, consider spending that energy on creating a new resource. Build the wall, one brick at a time.