SERPS showing wrong page

[absolutely17]

I have optimised a homepage for two keywords. I optimised this a few weeks ago and the page has been crawled by Google, also before this it was already reasonably well optimised for these terms. However, the homepage is not appearing in Google for these terms. Instead two other random pages on the site are appearing for these terms that have not been optimised for these keywords and have few mentions of the keywords on the pages!??

These pages have a lower DA and lower inbound links than the homepage.

The homepage is showing for other lower competition keywords.

Could anyone offer me some insight into this? The homepage content has been posted on other websites by a former SEO consultant - to a business directory for one? Could duplicate content be causing this problem?

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I suppose it's possible that duplicate content could be an issue if the exact same content is on other sites.  Try changing the content on the homepage so it's no longer duplicate and see what happens.

It's hard to say what's going on without doing an investigation into the situation.  It could be a duplicate content issue, but then again Google likes to show the pages (not sites) which they think are most relevant.  Perhaps, for one reason or another, Google just thinks those sub-pages are more relevant to the search query than the homepage is.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com