Privacy, disclaimer pages etc ranking higher than home pages for main keyword???

[wesmozart]

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Like many others I've been hit by the Google May Day shake-up. But one of the effects on some of my sites has me baffled.
The home page on several of my sites is now nowhere to be seen in a search for the main keyword even though, in every case, the main keyword is the domain name - yet other 'minor' inside pages do rank for the main keyword such as the disclaimer or privacy policy pages.
Prior to the algo change most of these sites were showing high on page one of the Google results for their main keyword. If I have a site called, for example, bluewidgets/co/uk, the home page doesn't appear in the results in a search for blue widgets (not in the first 20 pages anyway) but the site does show at about pages 10-15 for its disclaimer, privacy or terms of use pages.
If a site had been penalised I thought the content rich home page would still show in the serps for the main keyword before a disclaimer or privacy page? I've checked in webmaster tools and nothing is being flagged up there by Google. Anyone got an ideas why this would be happening?

[boxfish]

Without seeing the site my initial thoughts would be:

1. These pages have lots of original content - other parts of the site don't
2. These pages are benefiting from internal linking more than others
3. A combination of the above two
4. Some kind of crawl error meaning the main pages have not been indexed/crawlable for some reason

[wesmozart]

Hi -thanks for the reply - no, the situation is the exact opposite - the disclaimer, privacy etc pages do NOT have original content by their very nature, whereas the home pages on the various sites and inside category pages do have plenty of unique content . Also, the disclaimer etc (which are showing much earlier in results for the main keyword compared to the home pages) have no internal links to speak of, other than the nav bar text links in the footer - whereas the home pages on the various sites, have plenty of keyword rich internal linking. Everything was fine prior to the Google algo change.