Search engine spiders and <iframe> tags

<FRAMESET> tags are known to cause problems for search engine spiders.

Does the same thing apply to content in an <iframe src="url"> tag?

If I put a link to the same page within the tags <iframe>
like this </frame> , will it be recognised by the spiders?

IMO spiders have no real problems following frames/iframes, but they are viewed as separate pages. So the problem with framesets is not that the bot can't follow the link (because that would be silly), but that the page appears to have no regular content. And it's difficult to perform on-page SEO on pages without content

The page on which the iframe is located already has its own content. The iframe would be a small box on the page.

Naturally if there was no content on the page itself it wouldn't be any help for SEO.

You will "never" get that iframe to rank for anything. Why do you have to use an iframe?

You can achieve the same effect (look) as an iframe has by using a div and css. That will make the content not being viewed as a seperate page.

I was experimenting with the iframe as a way of putting a .php page within a .html page.

To explain the full picture:

I have a RSS feed for news items on my site.

I wanted to parse the newsfeed headlines onto my redesigned .html homepage (which will use CSS and DIV). I tried a number of scripts, none of which seemed to work within a .html page. (I am hoping to keep my homepage as index.html if possible, rather than change to .php.)

I found one .php script which reads the RSS data and presents the headlines in a list in a .php file. Call it 'feed.php'. The iframe was a way of displaying feed.php within index.html.

Another idea which I had tried was to create a .htaccess file containing:

<Files "http://www.website.com/index.html">
AddHandler server parsed .html
</Files>

and then add an include statement within a <DIV></DIV> on index.html to read feed.php. Unfortunately this didn't work for me.

My hosting server does support SSI.

I'll see if I can figure out another way and report back. If anyone has a suggestion, I'd be interested...

OK, I got a solution using the object method. (Got a tip on another website) I put:

<object data="http://www.website.com/feed.php" type="test/html">

into the <DIV></DIV> tags, and it works almost perfectly.

One slight drawback: The dimensions of the <Div> are 600px X 400px, but the feed only takes up around 100px X 200px.

If I can solve this small problem, I can forget about iframe and includes!