Alright, this isn't really a problem for me, but it's just weird. My blog had one page that was ranked like #6 or 7 for a certain 2-word phrase. Then, I edited the META description of the page, and it dropped off the front page. Now, that specific page isn't even in the top 5 PAGES of google results. However, my HOMEPAGE is ranked like #15 for it, and it's rising. Why would this happen? To summarize: I had mysite.com/blablabla ranking for the term "blablabla" Now mysite.com/blablabla doesn't rank, but mysite.com does. Do homepages do that? Like if I ranked mysite.com/haha for the term "haha", would my homepage eventually rank well for "haha"? My homepage is pr1 and the individual post is not, but still...why would this happen?
well if your home page is targeting that meta keyword you removed from the inner page...of course it is going to rank
You have a blog... it's the nature of a blog. Blogs are a much different beast than a traditional site. Imagine the following scenario: You write a post and of course it has it's own URL. But the post is highlighted on the home page of your site for a month or so until it rolls off of the home page and into the archives. While it's on the home page, your home page is passing it a substantial amount of PR and relevance. So your post begins to rank half decent for your keyword phrase. Other sites maybe decide they like your post and start linking to your home page with your targeted keywords for that post because, at that time, the post was still being hightlighted on the home page. Even traditional sites have this problem where most links point to the home page... deep links are hard to get. At some point your post rolls off of the home page and is only accessible from your category and monthly archive links. It's no longer being passed very much PR and the monthly archive page that links to it now is less relevant because the archive page's inbound links don't have the keywords in it that existed in the inbound links to the home page. It's only inbound links typically have link text like, "Dec 2009". So your post's rankings begin to tumble. Meanwhile some of the sites that had linked to your home page because of the post and with keywords related to the post in the link text are now possibly just being crawled, especially if they the sites that link to your home page only get crawled every couple of weeks or once a month. Even if they've already been crawled prior to the post rolling off the home page, it's rumored that you only get a certain % of boost from a link in the rankings when it's new and as it ages your boost increases. So now the home page's rankings are actually increasing while the post's rankings are on the decline which is exactly what you are seeing at the present. What you describe I think is pretty common for blogs... It's why I hate using blog posts/comments for backlinks. Because they're effective initially when you get a link from a post because you're on the blogs home page, but when the post gets archived their effectiveness fades... and frequently the post will even get deindexed at some point which means it's not even considered as a link any more. I would rather have a link from a traditional site any day. If you're that worried about it, create a permanent link on your home page directly to the post. It should help.