What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result

[plumvoice]

On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase.

What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.

[TimHolmes]

Sorry, I do not know the answer, but like yourself I am experiencing a very similar situation were a main key term returns our home page and yet a couple of days back it was the specific deeper page being returned, it is switching around quite regularly. Would also like to see if anyone has a response!

Good Question SRWills.

[David-Kley]

After the update on the 20th, we have seen similar results on certain keywords. Big item here: DONT FREAK OUT.

The last think you want to do is start changing a bunch of items on your site, and possibly get them both removed. If you wanted to take some kind of action, you could start looking at ways to help the page you want to rank. (Personally, I think its best if you can get them both to rank on page one, as it seems like Google likes both pages.)

Start to add a few links to whatever page you want showing up, both internally, and through different blog or media elements. What you want to try and do is tell Google "This is the more important page".

These kinds of things are common around when Google releases an update. Sometimes things look goofy for a few months while they actually get it applied. I don't think (my theory, not proven) that Google releases its algo update all at one time, hence why they say the are "rolling out" a new update when they release it. I think it is "rolled out" over a period of time, and that could be why you are seeing such results.