“Does Product Price Determine Ranking?” Google Responds

Your site has a product for $100. Another site has the same product for a higher price. Is there a ranking difference?
SIA Team
October 14, 2021

During the Q&A session, titled English Google SEO Office-Hours from October 8, 2021, Google Search Advocate John Mueller read out loud the following scenario/question:

“If there are two competing e-commerce sites that sell exactly the same product– one website offers the product at $500, the other at $100–all SEO signals are equal. Would the less expensive website have a better chance of ranking because there’s such a price difference for the exact same product?”

The video below is queued to the approximate point when the question was addressed.

From a Search Perspective, No

“So purely from a web search point of view, no. It’s not the case that we would try to recognize a price on a page and use that as a ranking factor.”

But…There’s Something Else to Consider

“So it’s not the case that we would say we’ll take the cheaper one and rank that higher. I don’t think that would really make sense. However, a lot of these products also end up in the Product Search results, which could be because you submit a feed, or it could be because we recognize the product information on these pages.

“And the product search results, I don’t know how they’re ordered. It might be that they take the price into account, or things like availability.

“All of the other factors that kind of come in and [are attributes of] Product Search. 

“So, from a Web Search point of view, we don’t take the price into account. From a Product Search point of view, it’s possible. And the tricky part, I think, as an SEO is these different aspects of search are often combined in one search results page, where you’ll see normal web results, and maybe you’ll see some product results on the side, or maybe you’ll see some mix of that.”

I Know What You’re Thinking

How do you get Product Search visibility, particularly if you’re a smaller retail site? Well, I’d encourage you to look into it. You can start with an article I wrote last month (September 2021): Google Announces New Feature That May Excite Retail Businesses.

Source: Google Search Central YouTube channel