Google focusing on interior pages vs home page?

[ichthyous]

Since last year it appears that Google seems to be favoring interior content pages over the home page on my site. Before November most of my traffic from Google hit my home page...now it enters through lower ranking category pages one level down. I have a large image gallery site with several major categories and this has really hurt my traffic since my interior pages now have to go head to head with other sites' home pages. Most of the sites which rank higher than mine are ranking on their home page since they are less diversifed in their content. It will be nearly impossible to get my interior pages to rank as highly as other site's home pages...is there any possibility that this trend might reverse itself?

[aristotle]

Each page should be optimized for its own target keyword or group of keywords. If they are mainly competing for different keywords or key phrases, then they mostly won't compete against each other.

[ichthyous]

Thanks for your response, but it's not really what I asked. The issue is that Google is now sending all traffic to category pages which rank less than my home page. Those category pages are competing head to head with other websites' home pages. In other words...sites which have a lot of diversified content are losing out to sites which focus on one topic because our interior pages are competing with their home pages. Google used to rank my home page for most searches and then another link to the subcategory underneath it.

[aristotle]

Do you mean that the competetion for certain search terms has gotten tougher because other people have created new gallery sites that are focused on a narrow topic?