welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], AlexJ!

you should be consistent in all your citations and you should use whatever is the canonical url, which in most cases would be https://www.example.com/
most importantly, you should implement a 301 redirect, so that all requests for the noncanonical versions of the url should redirect to the canonical version.

Hi AlexJ and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Sorry for the edits, but to discuss domain names we use "example.com" and the http format examples were not visible to others.

You should always use one version for your site because if anyone wants to link to your site and/or share it with others, you might have a confusing mix of references. Ideally you would want to stick to one version and rewrite other versions to that one.

no matter what prefix I type in today, my website still shows up anyway

Well, I should hope so. But three of those four times involve--or should involve--a redirect to the form you prefer.

If there is no redirect, and your browser's address bar really can end up with any of
http://example.com
http://www.example.com
https://example.com
https://www.example.com
then that is something you need to fix. If you are afraid to mess with your htaccess (or equivalent in non-Apache servers), your host should have a simple clickbutton where you tell them the form you prefer.

The question about including protocol (http:// or https://) is an interesting one, though it isn't really about SEO. In any current browser, if you type in just
example.com
it will supply the http:// and take you to the right place. (Right now it has to start with http, accepting a redirect to https if appropriate, but I suppose in ten years or so browsers might default to https ... possibly ending with “The site can’t be reached. Try a non-secure connection?”) But I think most people still expect to see that leading http://

The visibility tab in your Carrot site-builder allows you to set a canonical URL. That one should be set to your preferred version, probably https://www.example.com

I suppose in ten years or so browsers might default to https

it's coming sooner than that...

if you're running Chrome Canary, Dev, or Beta and you want some more https in your life, go to chrome://flags and search for + enable "#omnibox-default-typed-navigations-to-https". Chrome will now send schemeless hostnames over https:// instead of http:// by default

source: [twitter.com...]

Hm, interesting. The two browsers on my iPad--the new one, not the one from 2011--both still default to http. (I tested by requesting my personal site, which wouldn't be in either browser's history, and then checking logs. Two separate redirected requests, a minute or so apart, surprisingly not separated in logs by three bingbot requests for robots.txt.) I thought of the iPad because just last night it suddenly refused to go online at all, no way nohow, without a word of explanation. Turned out it wanted me to change a setting on my wifi router. I guess there is not much point in going to an https site if all kinds of things can still go flying around in the air near your router.

:: suppressing further weirdnesses revealed by this experiment ::

Thanks to all who replied to my inquiry! You guys rock! I got a lot of helpful info already, even though some extra questions surfaced, but I'm learning.

Alex

I would suggest on printed material like business cards or anything that is intended to be read use the shortest thing possible, example.com. That is whether you intend on using www version or not.

I would also suggest ditching the www altogether, why needlessly complicate things? There may be reasons some may need to do but 99.9% of sites don't need it and never will.

Redirect all requests for www and http version to https version without www.

There may be reasons some may need to do but 99.9% of sites don't need it and never will.

as soon as you need a CDN, for example, you'll wish you were on a www hostname.
or if you want to serve media, style sheets, etc from a cookieless subdomain someday...

I use the one that sounds better, prosodically. Currently I have two sites with shorter names that take a www, and two with longer names that don't. Then again, I may be the last person who remembers the rule-of-thumb that if your surname is one or two syllables you should give your children three-syllable names, while if it's longer you cut back to 1 or 2 syllables.

phranque, I'm behind Cloudflare and they can deal with that internally if the need arises. It would nice to have such a problem but I'm not holding my breath. :)


Introducing CNAME Flattening: RFC-Compliant CNAMEs at a Domain's Root [blog.cloudflare.com]

What Cloudflare does with CNAME flattening is called vendor lock-in. A vendor of a "free" service adds non-standard functionality to their services to attract customers and prevent them from going elsewhere. Microsoft tried it with Internet Explorer. It fired back enormously.

I'm a little late to the party, but my advise on printed materials would be to do what you think your target audience will recognize.

In my case, the domain is my company name AND I'm well established, so I can get away with printing a great big EXAMPLE.COM on a billboard and expect most people to know what's going on. But I'm more and more shocked at how people have forgotten how to do basic things like "click a link" (seriously), and I recognize that those people might see that and not even recognize that it's a website.

I'm not even joking... at least 2 or 3 times each month, someone will message me on Facebook asking how to get to my website. I send them a link, they don't understand to click on it; or worse, they tell me that they don't have internet, just Facebook!

The point, though, is to focus on what works for your target audience.

I think that you can safely forgo the http:// or https:// in 100% of cases, though.

When you're posting links online, though, I prefer to skip the http AND www, then capitalize the domain strategically to make it easier to read; eg:

Example.com
MyDomain.com

buuuuut, since you're talking about posting these on blogs and social media, keep in mind that their system may require the http:// to even recognize that the text should be converted to a link. That's how I do it on my sites, anyway; there are often fields for "Website" or "Email" that I automatically convert, but in the text I scan for http:// and convert it automagically.