Landing page ranks higher but home page removed from index

[stephench]

Recently, for a major keyword, the ranking of my website has changed. There are two pages involved. The first page is the main homepage which has light SEO and focuses on readability and conversion rate. The 2nd page is a search-engine-oriented landing page with heavy SEO and poorer readability for human. Previously, both pages appear in the 2nd page of google search results at similar positions.

A couple of weeks, the landing page moves up to the end of 1st page. However, the homepage completely drops out of the first 10 pages for this keyword.

The homepage does still come up for other keywords. But I am still concerned whether this is due to some kind of penalty since the homepage has much much more external links from relevant websites.

I did have some SEO people build some amount of external links coming back to my website recently. The links they build are all from those irrelevant directories and classifieds websites. I am not sure it has any use at all. If somehow these links are creating damage, I would like to stop using them immediately.

Please kindly advise.

[SEO Haven]

What is your website's url? Maybe it was due to a manual review which sometimes occurs when hitting page 1

[SEO Haven]

Another thing, look at getting more content. Thin-content sites are big targets for Google and honestly, 2 pages just won't cut it in the long term

[Ents]

When I made my site. I was going through something similar. Finally got on page 1 with the long trail keywords I was going for on the worst page of my site or least of the good content, but since then I have a good page on page 1 and like 3 other pages on page 2. I am curious what will change with the upcoming caffeine update.

[stephench]

We have much more than 2 pages on the websites. It's not a thin-content website. We reached 1st page for a short duration before. We do have another website with similar content. The content in the two websites are about 75% similar since the products are two software with very similar features. Maybe google decided to drop one of them out of the ranks due to duplicate content.

[epixeltechno]

have you check the keywords priority?

[new_seo]

Before suggesting you anything, I would like to see both of the landing page and home page. Also what was the purpose of creating the landing page.

[chiragparekh]

The homepage does still come up for other keywords. But I am still concerned whether this is due to some kind of penalty since the homepage has much much more external links from relevant websites.

I did have some SEO people build some amount of external links coming back to my website recently. The links they build are all from those irrelevant directories and classifieds websites. I am not sure it has any use at all. If somehow these links are creating damage, I would like to stop using them immediately.

Please kindly advise.

It is drop not a penalty. <- period
Directories are not completely dead and not all directories are useless... you need to analyze directories in which your SEOs have submitted your website's pages.

We have much more than 2 pages on the websites. It's not a thin-content website. We reached 1st page for a short duration before. We do have another website with similar content. The content in the two websites are about 75% similar since the products are two software with very similar features. Maybe google decided to drop one of them out of the ranks due to duplicate content.

As you said you have 2 similar websites with 75% matching content one website might be filtered by Google. What Google advise is if you are dealer and manage online store, you should keep your product description unique than your manufacturers.