URL Variations

[kapow]

How important is it to make sure incoming links are to the same url e.g.:
[name.com...] and www.name.com
Do Search Engines (when assessing link popularity) see these two urls to be different?

[Marcia]

kapow, I have accidentally had 2 listings on the same SERP for the same page. They ended up removing one - left the one with www.

Not all websites are set up to display without the www, so I would say that since it's important to be consistent, choose one - using www.domain.com is probably the best choice.

If pages show up listed differently, I would assume the links would too, and could confuse the count.