Different CRUs vBSEO employs

I bought vBSEO a long time ago and am now thinking of using vbulleting/vbseo for my new company. I noticed that the URLs seem to have changed a little, or the defaults maybe have changed. I remember my URLs for forum threads being of the same form these forums use: /title-of-post-1234. And I think I remember the categories being named in the URLs too, though I see these vbseo forum categories named f1, f2, f11, etc. Why aren't vbseo's forums categories named better in the url?

Then I looked at some other sites like the following and noticed another CRU pattern:
SEO Forum - Webmaster Forum
Games and Hardware - The Couch Potatoes

the category URLs look good, but the number in the thread URLs is in the begining instead of the end: /1234-title-of-post
So is this the better way for CRUs? I don't see conceptually why putting the number in front is better.

Lastly, I saw something interesting on the featured vBSEO enabled site:
psicofxp.com
their category URLs look like /category-name.123. I like the period, takes the focus off the number by making it like an extension. But the threads are the same /1234-title-of-post format. Why not have the period/extension format for thread URLs too?

I understand you can probably customize all of this in vBSEO (I don't remember the options exactly), but I'm trying to see what the best format is and if there are better mechanisms. Lastly, I noticed the number vBSEO prepends or appends to the thread URLs looks like the thread's id. Why not have it as the unique identifier of the thread title? Do search engines not care if the number is 2 vs 2834? I would think the focus would be more on the title if the number was minimized.

We have several different preset URL Rewriting formats to choose from. We decided to go with an experimental version that treats threads like virtual folders and focused on the thread title instead of the forum category.

Thread id at the front or back of your URLs is not expected to make a big difference in ranking. SEs will largely disregard these numbers. In SEO there are theories related to "occurrence priority".

This usually boils down more simply to: stuff that occurs earlier has is more influential on the page's rank than stuff that occurs later. In terms of the URL, you could apply this theory to mean the thread id should occur later, since it's not relevant to the actual content of the page.

psicofxp is a customized format (not one of our defaults).

We use the thread ID because there is no strong reason to replace it with another numeric identifier, but (more importantly) it's required for performance purposes. Having the thread id available in the URL helps make the stuff going on in the background occur more efficiently.

You can see the different options in action using our Demo:
http://www.vbseo.com/demo/

Thank you Joe for answering my questions completely! Excellent customer service! What's interesting about my post is it showed up immediately in the google alert I have for my name. This is the first time google alert has shown a forum post of mine even though I post new threads in other forums (mostly vBulletin) all the time. I guess there is something to this vBSEO .

I understand your explanation of why you used f1, f2, f3, etc for your category names. Makes sense, by not having the category name in the url, threads are more focused on their title. Thank you for explaining that. Though you could have the categories themselves with their name in the url and when referencing a thread, the category then gets f1, f2, etc in the url.

Personally, I'd rather deal with the performance issues of having to do an extra lookup to find the thread id from the thread title. I have to imagine search engines favor, if only slightly, /a-beautiful-day-3 over /a-beautiful-day-69234 for a search on "a beautiful day." And then your URLs are a little prettier too . Maybe an option for a future version of vBSEO?

What do you think about the SEO effectiveness of psicofxp's period urls? It seems like /a-beautiful-day.3 or even /a-beautiful-day.69234 is much better than above. The numbers are clearly indicated to be less important as an extension. You could further minimize the numbers with an alpha-numeric mapping or base64 encoding. So a common thread title of "help me" might be /help-me.z5.

I tried the demo and see all the options. You guys definitely have a lot of great options for tweaking the URLs. Why have an option for URLs like mustangevolution.com? Why did they choose to have their URLs of the form /t3923? Completely eliminates CRUs. Aren't CRUs good?

Sorry for all the questions... These little things happen to matter a tremendous amount to me as I expect a lot of search engine traffic (don't we all...) for my business.

I really don't think we will be doing anything with the thread ids in the URL, as far as replacing them with other id formats. We consider them acceptable given the performance trade-offs and risks that would occur by removing them completely.

When your forum gets big you don't want any extra lookups (i.e. database queries). Everything adds up, so it's highly advisable to keep an optimum configuration even in the early days under the presumption that your forum will become successful, highly trafficked, thereby leading to a time when saving a query may become very important to you.

I think psicofxp's URLs are a bit strange in appearance at least in terms of being unique for sure, although it's hard to say anything bad about them given that they have been so successful with vBSEO.

I think that one of the key points here is although keyword rich URLs can be helpful with SEO, the vitally more important factor that we achieve with URL rewrites is link consensus:
Pin the Tail on the SEO Donkey (with Link Consensus)!

Formats like /t3923 help to achieve very clean URLs for forum admins not interested in using the CRUs, but (more importantly) still allows them to achieve full link consensus.