phranque - 2:32 am on Nov 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

Having a domain accessible both with and without the www won't confuse a bot any more than texas.example.com and california.example.com would ... Having the same content available on both can create duplicate content issues for algorithms, but it's actually handled by search algo's way better now than it used to be, because they basically just pick one to show in the results when both are available with the same content.

the point is that the different hostnames are different urls and also can have different robots.txt, so although the search engines usually/eventually figure it out, there are things you can do to screw that up.