Did adding scraped RSS to my pages kill Google Ranking?

[sitecreations]

Hi... another mystery.

I wrote a PHP script to grab and display rss on a site's "industry news" pages for one of my clients. It takes the XML, parses is, and inserts it in the HTML pages neatly formatted. It was using Yahoo News Search RSS/XML.

My theory was it would give server-side content to the pages and that would be:

a) useful to the visitor
b) interpreted as fresh content by SEs

...but what happened was that after I added it, my Google ranking plummited. Removing them caused a slow crawl back up. No other changes were done on the site. It's worth noting that these were ADDED pages, not replacements for any existing page.

Anyone else experienced a drop when feeds added to a site?

THANKS

[bhartzer]

after I added it, my Google ranking plummited
It's most likely a coincidence. Adding frequently update content will help--unless you added something like Run-of-site links or something else that they didn't like. If you're using duplicate content and your pages end up being duplicates of other pages then those duplicate pages would end up being removed--not a major cause of rankings, though.

If sites disappeared lately, I would first look at linking as the most likely culprit.

[sitecreations]

So, as I thought, you'd agree that a well-deployed scraper that publishes public RSS on relevant pages in my site is a good thing?

E.g. a site about Kentucky Bourbon could benefit from rss coming in from a PRfeed about "recipes using Bourbon". The script executes server side.