homepage stealing my keywords but not affecting others

I'm finally ranking for some certain terms after finding the mother of all backlinks- I just got lucky with this one

3 of my terms are now ranking above toptenreviews for my targeted term at around #5, however google is ranking my homepage for the keywords rather than the individual posts.

I have these 3 pages I'm trying to rank hyperlinked on the home page with their post title as the anchor. Consequently, my home page is ranking for the title of these terms rather than the posts themselves.

However, I have a lot of other pages on my website where the hierarchy is set up so that Google has to find them through my noindexed category pages. They are indexed. They are not mentioned on the home page. The problem is that these are not budging in SERPS at all. They are typically ranked around 20s.

As for the keywords, they are not stuffed. Typically around 1% and slightly lower for longer keywords. All my keywords are medium-low comp.


How can I get these 3 terms ranking, and how can I get the rest of my site ranking which isn't mentioned on the home page at all?

This seems like a strange one to me. Are all your pages definitely indexed in Google? Seems as if the pages are being noindexed and referring to your homepage.

yes definitely indexed. I think it's the keyword penalty as referred to by PHPBUILT

Even though it's around 1% I just remembered I have a lot of partial match and secondary internal links to those pages, so I'll turn down the density and see what happens

hydrix95 said:

yes definitely indexed. I think it's the keyword penalty as referred to by PHPBUILT

Even though it's around 1% I just remembered I have a lot of partial match and secondary internal links to those pages, so I'll turn down the density and see what happens

Click to expand...

On those pages do you have internal links back to your home page?

aside from the home button, no.


edit:
google reindexed the pages but same condition with SERPS

could it be content cannibalization? My keywords are

best xxx under $$ --shows home page #5
best xxx under $$$ --shows home page #5
best xxx for the money --shows my post, but #20

these are the 3 pages that are linked from my home page (static home page) and all the other pages on my site seem unaffected
seeing those top 2 keywords on front page is a huge surprise

thanks for feedback

update:
My blog title was "something something 2015" and my post titles were "best xxx under $$ 2015". I renamed blog title to check for possible keyword stuffing penalties, but no changes.

I also turned down the keyword densities on both pages, one turned down to around .6 for testing and the other to around .9
no changes

Lastly, I'm not sure how to get the rest of the site ranking. Should I try siloing? I only have 30 or so pages, but maybe it will help.

I'm thinking that even though all my pages are indexed and ranking in the 20s, Google isn't applying any benefit to them since the only way to get to them is through the noindex follow category pages. However, that doesn't explain why the 3rd page linked from the homepage is still in the 20s and its page shows, as explained above.

update:

here's the strange thing....

Checking behind a proxy and a different browser gives something 100% different.

In this case, one page is ranking for the other term, and the other page is ranking for the one term. Again, I'm using exact title anchor... I think I know what to do now. Change the exact match anchor and it should fix everything.

As for the mysterious SERPS... It seems to be the infamous "google bubble" altering search results based on browsing history. Interestingly, it stayed the same regardless of clearing browsing history / cache. It looks like CHROME tracks browsing history. Not sure why it gave my site strange SERPS behavior, though. That explains why serpbo0k was showing something so different.

SEO is like sailing across the ocean to a mysterious island of magical google ranking and there's so much that can go wrong



edit:
okay... the pages were ranking for each other's terms (best xxx under $$ was ranking for best xxx under $$$... and vice versa) which is extremely weird. The two pages mention completely different lists of products so I don't think it's duplicate.
I was suspicious of the exact title texts mentioning each other's posts so I removed them and sent them to fetch as google. The results? NO difference. The pages are ranking for each other's terms and have absolutely no mention of the fact!
As of right now the densities are around .6 and .9, and the only thing I can think of is that these are too low to actually show a signal of relevancy to google. Interesting! I'll try increasing the densities to around 1% and see if that gives the signals to google that shows what they're about.

I'm not sure if I should keep updating this thread, but I can only say that I've learned a ton about densities, SERPS, and keywords so I thought I would share my findings

Any updates on this?
I see my home page ranking for a site, when an optimized page previously ranked (long time ago)...?!

I though KW density may be an influencing factor, but only just started looking into it, so any insight you have would be appreciated