Fresh content is definitely a plus for search engine rankings. Fresh content will be crawled more often.

A site I manage offers free rss/xml news feed and also an easy to implement javascript feed.

Real Estate News Feed

Hi altarealtor,
I have heard the same thing. One also needs to keep in mind that there are actual people looking at the site and not just SEs. One problem with RSS is that it can be used to provide content unrelated or telling nothing about the Realtor on her own website.

-Peter

Reasonably sure that using the javascript feed will not help with the search engines, as the text itself doesn't appear on the site. You need to use .php and embed the text on your page.

One place that state this is:

http://whitehatcrew.com/seo/rss-for-seo.php

That's true Peter, but the feed shouldn't have any more wieght than a link to any other associated site, in a relevance sense.

Maybe what should be set up is a feed that is parsed by the server script to personalize some of it's content based on the referring server.