Google Says Ranking Well In Shopping Boxes, Images Boxes & Other Verticals Does Not Hurt Your Web Rankings

John Mueller from Google said that ranking well in the Google Shopping or Google Image vertical boxes does not impact your ranking in the core web results. He said, “I can’t imagine that they’d be connected” when asked about how ranking well in the Merchant Center results can impact the web results.

Christian Radny asked:

I can see, that my shops have really high exposure of free merchant listings in SERPS. I wonder if the merchant listings push down organic pages to reduce a too high exposure of one site.

John Mueller replied:

I can’t imagine that they’d be connected. Similarly, I can’t imagine that images being shown in an “image box” would negatively affect the appearance of the page itself.

Here are those posts:

I can’t imagine that they’d be connected. Similarly, I can’t imagine that images being shown in an “image box” would negatively affect the appearance of the page itself.

— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

To be fair, back in 2022, Google did do deduplication of top stories from the web results in some cases. So top stories technically is a vertical search feature, so Christian’s question does make sense.

Forum discussion at X.