At WebmasterWorld, a forum member is baffled by the fact that his homepage isn’t ranking for a relevant search term; instead, one of the internally-linked pages rank. According to the forum member, the homepage has the right keywords within the title tag and should be targeted appropriately, but the internal page outranks it.

It seems that this forum member is not alone. Another member encountered a similar issue recently. Other forum members suggest that it could possibly be a temporary thing, but if (after 3 weeks or so) nothing has changed, it may be helpful to optimize those pages again.

Another possibility could be over-optimization of the front page, which could result in a penalty as we’ve seen before. One forum member makes this case clear:

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.