One of my site is a blogger blog. And before submitting a sitemap in the webmaster tool, google was indexing my homepage URL and ranked it for the targeted keyword, (which is also my domain). Then I was reading all these advices that you should submit a sitemap to get your site to be crawled easier, and so I did. But after doing that,I noticed that google was indexing two of my post pages simultaneously for the targeted keyword instead - causing my homepage to drop off the serps. I would have been ok with this IF ranking improves. But instead, the post pages are actually appearing much lower from where my homepage did before. I then removed my sitemap to see if things go back to the way they were before, but so far google is still only indexing the subpages and not my homepage - and this is extremely frustrating as I've lost all progresses that I had before. Any idea what causes this and what could be done?
i don't think sitemap submission was the reason for it. every page is measured as unique for different keywords.
I can definitely tell you that the homepage has more keyword density than the post pages. It's also the only page that has meta tags which include the targeted keyword in its content and description. I think what had happened is when I submitted the xml sitemap, it shows the SEs the most recently updated pages on top to bottom. Therefore google sees the recent updated page as the homepage rather than the homepage itself.
It could be anything. It could be dupe content..... I would say just keep getting more links pointing to your home page.