Hello all and thank you in advance for any advise that you can offer. I have read that fresh content is a good practice and can help SEO, I decided to use an RSS feed of related articles on my page to achieve this. The feed is contained in an iframe, my question is, does this matter that the content is in an iframe? Is there some reason that this would be a bad idea or have little to no effect at all? Would the spiders pick up on it and consider it content of my page or would it ingnor it?
fresh content means adding new articles to your site. i think using rss feed does not mean fresh content
Putting rss feed is considered a fresh content if you do it correctly. I've seen sites with high PR and serp that contains only rss feeds. However, if you do it "wrongly" then you could be in "duplicate content" trouble. Putting it in iframe makes it void. Spiders will consider both as different files, thus your main page (the one with the rss feed) would have no fresh content in spider eyes.
Its best if you create your own content, not import other people's content on your site. Most importantly, the iframe is not seen as part of the page, it is a separate page...googlebot cannot read what's in that iframe
Slightly off-topic, but do you think that changing around main page content and re-writing existing articles would help?
no..changing around the page will not help...its still the same content just in a different order......rewriting articles can help...but it depends how different it is from the original version...and don't steal other people's work....you can summarize or review things that would be interesting to your audience
Thanks for the response. That is really what I needed to know, whether content (article or feed) inside an iframe would be considered part of the "spidered page content". So I suppose the "right way" to do so would be to just copy the articles directly in to my page, with out the iframe and give proper copyright credit...