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Stox has shown himself to be very intelligent time and again, and more to the point, he knows what he's talking about. But I have to disagree with him in this instance. While I don't give much weight to "page strength" I do think the search engines, particularly Google, prefer pages that have the keyword in the URL. If all things were equal, which in your case with future posts they would be, when somebody searches for something that's part of the title of your post, having that phrase in the URL and the title tag is better than only having it in the title tag. Also, when people link to one of your posts to talk about it, but just make the URL the anchor text, having the keyword you want in the URL will have the added benefit of putting that phrase in the anchor text. All of the major forums let users create links with whatever text they'd like, but some of the hand-written ones, including some large scale forums, only allow for the URL as anchor text.
Can you redirect the old style of URL to the new style? If you have any control over the code that should be pretty easy. It will take the engines some time to sort things out, but eventually your PR will carry over from your existing posts. But the new ones will benefit immediately.
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