Specific Page changed to the main url in search results

[limoshawn]

I've been working on getting a specific page ranking well for a bit now and finally this morning I had this page on the first page of results. When I checked the results again this afternoon, the specific page had been replaced by the site's main url (which had never ranked for this keyword) and moved down to the second page of results.

Any ideas why this would happen?

[tedster]

First, you've tapped into an area that is one of my little peeves with Google recently - returning a URL that is one click away from the most relevant for a given result. This effect has been bouncing around all year for me, back and forth, and I think it's related to the dials getting adjusted around internal anchor text.

But you just saw something almost as it happened - maybe a new data set kicked in just during that short time span. I'll be looking to see if more internal pages get switched out for higher level pages.

[AussieWebmaster]

the homepage has more pr and is linked to the other page... once that page is seen as ranking it shows an association with the higher pr homepage and the other takes over