Does Google really penalize those ecommerce sites where the category pages contain structured data?

Today I heard that Google penalizes those ecommerce sites where the category pages contain structured data. But I don't see any news piece on biggest SEO portals or on Google blog about this. If I'm right, if the category page lists the products with their structured data, then these categories will be deranked? We experinced a drop in one of our stores a while ago and so far I was not able to find out, why.

Where did you hear this? I'd be surprised if Google is down ranking websites for using markup

jamie3000 said:

Where did you hear this? I'd be surprised if Google is down ranking websites for using markup

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True, I forgot to write a detail, I heard that it punishes the category pages wich shows the product-related structured data in bulk. As these data pieces should be shown on the product page only and not be fetched on category pages.

Google doesn't typically penalize for using structured data on e-commerce category pages, but misusing it can cause issues. If you're using 'Product' schema on pages listing multiple products, it's not ideal. Use 'ItemList' for category pages instead.