homepage is outranking blog post on wordpress, why?

just wondering if anyone might have an answer for this.

my site's page was ranked #30 for a keyword term, and I was working on building it up. My page has stayed there for a little while, and I decided to make another blog post the other night, and I noticed that in the serps that now my sub-page that was ranking is gone, and my homepage is now in the 31'st spot for the same keyword.

Sounds a lot like over optimisation to me. What's your keyword density and anchor text ratio like?

it's probably over optimized then like you said, I just looked over php-builts article on over optimizing, I thought I had written things out correctly, but I may need to re-evaluate the situation, I'm trying to rank for a long tail keyword term, but all my keywords are pretty sporadic. I somehow need help on the article writing and or understanding how to rank a long tail keyword term maybe, I'm not sure.

Hmmm, yeah I see what you mean. Regarding how to write your article: seriously, just try and write it naturally. Obviously, you want to include the keyword/phrase or some variation of it in the title, then perhaps make reference to it once or twice throughout the article. DONT force it. Remember, when you're writing around a keyword, you're naturally going to mention it and other lsi keywords so don't overthink things. As for off page Seo, keep your exact match ~1% and include other words along with it. Try and always make them different. As for the remainder, use lsi, raw urls and generic things like 'here' and 'see more here' etc. Hope that helps man.

Thanks for your help James, I may just take down the article I just wrote the other night, and re-write my article I'm trying to rank for, and try to re-write it better and make it less over-optimized, I'll post my results in the next 24-48 hours thereafter to see if this does the trick. Thanks again!

This is super strange to me.

I deleted my new blog post, which was the reason why my homepage started outranking the old blog post in the serps.

I re-wrote my old blog post that was ranking before around 30 or so in the serps...After re-writing it, my homepage started outranking again and the blog-post was gone from the serps. (I used my keywords way less than before too)

For the hell of it, I put back the original blog post, and my blogpost is back in the serps, only it's ranking lower now, at the 38th spot.

So for the hell of it again, I posted back the re-written article, and BAM, the homepage ranks again, but ranks in the 30th spot.....I even excerpted it to see if I could get my blog-post back up, and no such luck.

Now I'm at a loss...should I just put back up the re-written article and let the homepage out rank because it ranks higher (and deal with the penalty of dupe content) ((I guess I could always de-index the blogpost, though it does have some backlinks to it and social cues))
Or do I just deal with whatever the hit was to my site making it go down to the 38th position, and start building back-links to it again (and deal with my article maybe not being awesomely written)

Man if anyone has any help in this area, I'm all ears for sure.

I think it's pretty strange I can re-write an article that I'm assuming is better and it causes my homepage to rank higher than the actual blog post.....

one more pretty strange thing to me is that I have the AIO plug-in installed, and on the original article the serps pick up the meta data description that I've specified in the AIO post settings just fine, but on the re-written article, I'm not changing any of the post settings, and yet the meta description will change over to using the first sentence from the new article as a meta description...I don't have the homepage set up at all to use keywords, descriptions, or even a title either.

Over optimization kills your rankings.

Blewitup said:

Over optimization kills your rankings.

Click to expand...

yeah, I've come to conclude that, but I literally wrote a longer article and used my keywords way less, and that's the article I can't get to rank on the blog post url, so is it under-optimization?

I'll split test this again and use the new article with my keywords mentioned more.

the new vs old blog post, are the url the same or different? Try making the url the same.