Yea, thanks, I was actually just looking at this since you mentioned lynda:
yep did that one too 
good one.
Oh god. I realized if I just have the urls contain all tags for the post, I’d be fine with that. But then this happened:
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/7004/tag-in-permalink-not-working
I want every tag for a post to be in the url. I can’t do that? Ugghh! Why not!? 
Omg omg I think I got it- here, this is my plan:
I’m gonna put everything in the title- the authors, the book title, etc. But since I have a custom theme, I’ll strip out the authors and title when it displays the title on the page. But the url will still have all of it.
So, like, I’ll have a delimiter, like:
Less 1 on Romeo and Juliet $$$ Shakespeare and Pauly Shore
And then I’ll regex out everything after the $$$ wherever it displays the title, but the url will still have the full title with the authors.
omg I’m a genius.
You know, you can just create the slug directly and it has nothing to do with the post title.
TITLE: This is the best day ever!
SLUG: just-discovered-bieber
You can set the url and the title to completely different things. This is just normal WP behavior, are you not seeing the field to create the slug? Any SEO plugins you use probably have a slug field too.
The only issue is WP first generates the slug based on the title. Then you have to come back and change it.
This is freaky, I just literally figured that out 10 minutes ago! One last question- if the slug is like
ninja-fight-john-malloy-jason-jackson/
And someone goes to google and searches their name, like “john malloy”, will this show up in the results? I mean if you look at it it would also result in searches for “malloy jackson”. As I’m typing this right now, I guess that’s not really a bad thing, it wouldn’t hurt… but anyway, is the hyphen an excepted delimiter between keywords that the search spiders pick up? Does it treat hyphens the same way it would treat a space?
Does the term “john malloy” appear in that page? Might Google reasonably determine that the page is about john malloy and relevant to a search for that term? If so, then yes, it’s likely to appear in the search results, although there’s no guarantee of its position. If no, then it’s highly unlikely to appear - unless, perhaps, there are very few results for that term anywhere on the Internet.
Things will ALWAYS show in the results somewhere, if your pages are indexed at all. But the second question is, indexed for WHAT keywords? Google will figure out what keywords are most relevant based on more than just the URL. If you have a “ninja fight” between two authors, and both authors are discussed at length, equally, in the content, then that page is likely to be ranked relatively equally for both names.
You can use hyphen for sure, that is common, search engines pretty much treat them as spaces.
You can even do no hyphens and type ninjafightjohnmalloyjasonjackson and they will be pretty smart in detecting the individual words just the same.
I managed an ecommerce store that created long ugly URLs with words smashed together, but they still ranked and detected the individual words just fine.
If for some reason you want to hide the page from ANY kind of search results, that’s what robots.txt is for.
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