Hey guys,

Me and my partner have been seeing something strange with our highly targeted local geo-centric SEO landing pages lately in a few cases and can't figure out what's going on. I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something similar.

What's Happening

We have noticed that certain pages that should be ranking for key terms aren't coming up at all, but it's definitely cached and indexed.

The homepage is ranking, but where typically we are able to squeeze another link onto the SERP via an LP, or take a site with a homepage on page 2 and rank a more relevant LP on page 1 for the specific geo-centric keyword phrase... Instead we are just seeing the homepage show, no LP at all.

It's been fetched, sitemap updated, and can verify it's been cached via searching for the URL directly in google.

Thoughts So Far

Typically if a page isn't optimized properly we see it on page 3-5 and can make adjustments. I've gone 10 pages deep and nothing.

It's not duplicated content either, completely unique. Also it seems to be effecting large metro areas as well as the smaller communities so i don't think it's strictly a "higher competition".

More puzzling is that we've been able to take other pages for similar key terms but a different geography, with the same domain, and get it to rank as expected.

The only thing I can think of is in one case, one of the pages had been created and indexed previously, we made changes to get better rankings and the page continued to be non-existant on the SERPS when using key phrases.

We have experienced this on two separate websites (different industry, domain, server, etc.)

I thought I read an article about Google preferring to show a homepage over a landing page when both pages are competing for a similar keyword or phrase, but I can't find it for the life of me to point to as a theory as to what's going on.

Many of our other pages we create rank just as expected, we've only seen this strange (hopefully) anomaly in the past few weeks.

Am I missing something?

Any insight would be appreciated.

Edit Thank you for the insight guys, I really appreciate the help.