Slug best practices?

[TheaterMania]

Hello, my team is trying to understand how to best construct slugs. We understand they need to be concise and easily understandable, but there seem to be vast differences between the three examples below.

Are there reasons why one might be better than the others?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/20/bad-boys-yum-yum-violent-criminal-or-not-this-mans-mugshot-is-heating-up-the-web/

http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/06/20/jeremy-meeks-sexy-mug-shot-felon-viral/

http://www.tmz.com/2014/06/19/mugshot-eyes-felon-sexy/

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I don't see that much differences in the URL structure of Hollywood Life and TMZ, their editors just chose the short or shorter variant for their news story (in most cases they don't have to worry about SEO). The Washington post is a pity as they have to add a couple of extra directories in their URL structure.

[SamuelScott]

That's a very subjective question, so I'll just list some references that you may want to review: Google's SEO guide (see pages 8-9 for URLs), Ann Smarty's post at SEJ, Moz's guide to URL best practices, and an old Moz post by Rand Fishkin on good URLs. I hope this helps!