Site map rather than home page in Serps after Penguin hit

[driller41]

One of my sites was hit by Penguin back in April, I have not managed to repair the damage yet.

One interesting thing is that now the SiteMap is the main page which Google indexes in it's serps - any thoughts as to why and how to get it to list the home page instead?

[aristotle]

Do you mean that the sitemap ranks for the same keywords that the homepage targets? Also, what do the rankings for both pages look like for long-tail and exact-quote searches?

[driller41]

Yes, the site was zapped by Penguin on the 24th, after that the sitemap now ranks for the term that the homepage ranked for - the main term, it is an EMD.

Initially the main term went down below page 5, google now ranks the site map for this term and it is on page 2 rather than the 1st position it previously enjoyed prior to Penguin.

[aristotle]

This is one of the strange oddities about Penguin. There are several other oddities about it as well. But I don't have an explanation for them.