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It is quite good if you have a tight content niche and make all your links no follow.  This will get rid of many of the spammers and can really help with long tail searches.  Avinash is a huge fan of this on his blog and he even keeps a metric on the ratio of the words written by him vs words written by engaged audience members.

But, you need to be the one driving the conversation and setting the agenda, if you don't you will just get spammers and junk on there.  Best of luck and feel free to PM me the blog, I'll check it out.

Well just thought I would give you all an update on how this turned out.  I ended up going with the sub-optimal layout - www.site.com/en/p/product/hard-drives-37/seagate-22 and even though it isn't perfect I still lifted rank from 5th to 1st.  I'm still working on a solution to make this perfect, but I can confidently say that this solution, even though it isn't perfect, still ranks very well

Hi Mozzers,

I have a client who has just launched a new website and we are having difficulties in making the URL's search friendly.  I wont get into the technical aspects, but I'll explain the potential solutions the developers have given me.

current: www.site.com/en/product/browse-by-product/37/22

Where 'en' stands for the English version of the website, 37 is the product category for example 'hard drives', and 22 is the product name or example 'seagate'

Option to fix;

www.site.com/en/p/product/hard-drives-37/seagate-22

This optional fix reduces the word product down to p, reduces 'browse by product' to 'product' and inserts the category and product names.  Note the category identifier '37' has to be included in the URL, and the product identifier '22' also has to be in the URL.  Obviously this is not great, but it is required at the moment.

Best case scenario would be to have the URL like this...

www.site.com/en/hard-drives/seagate

So my question is, how far off the best case scenario is the option to fix?  Scale of 1 to 10 would be good?