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Robbie

I am considering using Odoo for my website, which currently has 5k / month organic search traffic and a domain rank of 41. However, I have some concerns about how Odoo handles SEO.

My main issues are:

  1. Canonical URLs: The use of parameters for sorting, filtering, etc creates duplicate content issues. This leads to the DUST (duplicate URL, same text) problem which can negatively impact rankings. Even if a canonical URL is added, Odoo still seems to generate duplicate URLs under different filter conditions or pagination.
  2. Internal Linking Structure: The heavy reliance on parameters for URLs hinders the ability to pass link equity within a site, which can limit rankings for important keywords. Also, using parameters in internal links can cause google to ignore canonical tags. 
  3. Excessive Redirects: Due to the dynamic URL structures and parameters, Odoo seems to generate more redirects than ideal per page. Too many redirects can slow down crawl efficiency and hurt site trust with search engines.

I have seen this Reddit thread discussing these problems at length, with the general conclusion being that Odoo has some architectural decisions around URLs that make good organic SEO difficult. 

Have any of you found effective ways to overcome these hurdles while using Odoo? My site relies heavily on organic traffic, so I want to make sure Odoo would not cause my rankings to decline before migrating. If these issues can be addressed though, Odoo seems like an excellent platform otherwise. 

Thanks in advance for the help!


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JH

Does anyone know if there has been any improvements in Odoo 18?

Matthew Peters

Hi Robbie,

did you find an answer to your question? We've encountered the same exact problem and would greatly appreciate some advise.

Best regards,

Matthew

Robbie
Author

Hey Matthew - we built an entire site on Odoo for a large e-commerce business then decided to scrap it and redo the whole thing on shoppify. Odoo's website is fine for small businesses, but if you have a lot of ecommerce traffic and a competitive SEO niche then I don't think it's a viable option. There are too many SEO issues with the platform.

ERP is fantastic, website wouldn't work for us though. Sorry I don't have anything more helpful than that. 
  

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PASHA GOLSHANI
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I can share my own experience. We moved our e-commerce website with 40,000 monthly visitors from WooCommerce to Odoo. Despite improving all the content on our Odoo website compared to the WooCommerce website as part of the migration, we lost 50% of our organic ranking/traffic within 3 months affer migration to Odoo. Before the migration, we rasked #1 to #3 for our industry's most competitive keywords, and now we rank number #20 to #30 on average. No matter what we do, we can't improve the rankings on the Odoo website. Our SEO agency, one of the largest in Australia, told us that Odoo has fundamental framework design issues that significantly hurt SEO rankings. Odoo URLs are not SEO-friendly; they include category and product IDs. On product pages, the attribute values are part of the URL, so if you change the color of the same product, the URL changes (causing google to index the same content under different URLs). Additionally, there are many redirects, which further harm SEO. After months of trying to fix Odoo SEO issues, I have given up. These issues have been mentioned in many forums for years, and it seems no one at Odoo cares about it.


That said, I am not willing to go back to using different systems, as managing scattered systems was a nightmare for us and even affected my personal health. Now, with everything on Odoo, after years of working overtime to fix issues between systems, everything can be managed in one system so much more easily. However, I really hope someone at Odoo starts to look into this matter. Our Odoo website looks twice as good, and the content is twice as good, but the ranking is much worse than what we had on a poorly designed WooCommerce website that wasn't even mobile-friendly. If your revenue depends on organic search, I don't recommend migrating to Odoo at all until they fix these inherent design issues that significantly hurt SEO rankings.


If anyone from Odoo sees this comment could you please help with forwarding this concern to the website/ecommerce team (Let's see if anyone from Odoo cares to respond)

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Fadi Ezzeddine

Same issue here, lost more than 50% of my organic reach when moving the Odoo, even though like you mentionned, the Odoo website we built is way better than what i had on woo commerce.
However, when moving to Odoo, it helped my company save quite a few buck since the business is operating smoother and with less hicks and human error. I am reinvesting part of these savings in SEM which brought back our total customer reach to almost same level as before moving to Odoo.

Robbie
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Sorry to hear that. Yea I'm telling people the same thing, which is essentially Odoo for back end and Shopify for the website. I own two businesses, one with WooCommerce + Odoo and the other is Shopify + Odoo. I think Shopify works much better, we haven't had any issues.

I don't see why they don't just make their shopping cart a plugin for Wordpress like WooCommerce does. Odoo can't expect to beat wordpress / shopify on SEO unless that's the only thing the business did. It's also nearly impossible to find knowledgeable SEO / marketing consultants who use Odoo. The integrator network struggles enough with just getting the software in place, and they can't be expected to be SEO and marketing experts as well. It's a totally different skill set.

PASHA GOLSHANI

Thanks Fadi and Robbie. Just to provide an update, I contacted our account manager in Odoo about this issue and he checked the matter with their website team (in Australia not the head quarter) and they replied:

"I'd like to clarify that our URL structure shouldn't negatively affect our SEO. As a best practice, we utilize proper canonical tags to handle URLs with attributes, This means that while there might be multiple URLs for a page, the canonical tag ensures search engines recognize the primary version, maintaining our SEO integrity."

Initially when we wanted to move to Odoo our SEO agency advised against doing that and said the URL structure is not SEO friendly and could negatively impact our SEO ranking. I thought to myself that google should be intelligent enough not to penalize us just because the URL structure is not as clean as shopify and woocommerce but now I realized I was wrong. The Odoo team are still looking into the matter and I will provide an update once they get back to me.

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Sean Craig
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For anyone reading this, I see a lot of misunderstandings and assumptions in this string.

Yes, Odoo’s ecommerce website URL structure needs improvement, but Shopify's is worse. I see claims in this string that shopify has better seo. No. Shopify fails with SEO in a lot of ways. Scan a Shopify site with a crawler like Crazy Frog and you’ll find multiple URLs for each product. Not to mention, limited product variant options and a overly simplified and challenging to manage structured data. The blog UI isn’t great.(Blog UI is excellent in Odoo) There are no subcategories, so tags end up acting as makeshift categories. ...which exacerbates the URL and structured data issues.


Bottom line: Don’t switch to Shopify for better SEO. While it's a solid platform for other features, SEO is not one of them.


Structured data, blog UI, subcategories, product attriubutes are all fantastic in Odoo. If they can get the URL structure sorted, and clean up the heading tag structure (quite a mess, but easy to fix) and implement brands, they would have a solid ecom solution from an SEO perspective. 

For great ecommerce SEO out of the box I've found that BigCommerce scores really high. There are others, too. We develop ecommerce on BigCommerce for this reason. (I'm not affiliated with them.) It allows you in settings to choose from 3 'proper' URL architectures, including products, categories and brands. Product brands is an area where many e-commerce platforms fail. BigCommerce is similar to Shopify in many ways but has a significant advantage when it comes to SEO. It is less similar to Odoo ecommerce.


Odoo, on the other hand, is an amazing solution with many tools beyond ecommerce, offering great value if you need a versatile platform. While its website module is decent, it’s not ideal for competitive niches. You can build great-looking sites, but you’ll need some CSS tweaks for mobile responsiveness if you're using the website builder tool, and you will need to be satisfied with the URL structure the platform offers. ..and fix the heading structure. lol But again, that is relatively easy. Oh. And, there is no brands implementation, so you will need to use attributes, or come up with a custom solution for that.


Quick SEO Litmus Test for Your Ecommerce Platform

Navigate to a product brand page:

   - There is no navigation to brands? – Fail.

   - Can navigate to brands, but the brand URL is a query parameter? (like domain/?brand-name...") – Fail.

   - Simple brand URL, like “domain/brand”?– Perfect (example: enginepartscanada.ca/pai-industries`).


Hope this helps someone out!

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Kurt Haselwimmer
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I too thought that there was a problem with canonical tags - google was making reference to them but when I tried to look to see what google was talking about I couldn't see them. Turns out that it was just Odoo being too clever by half and hiding rel="canonical" tags if you're logged in.

Have a look at this (https://github.com/odoo/odoo/commit/9dfaf732063d8332fdcfd355ebe4037b71584bf8 ) fix in Odoo v18.0 

Check by viewing in Chrome incognito - navigate to an ecommerce store product via the category heirarchy and you'll see that the url has both the product code and the categories used to get to that point. Look at the source code and in the <head> near the top is a rel='canonical' tag which directs spiders to the pure product page. The only question for SEO experts is - is this the best strategy or does it leave google thinking that "here's a product page, but no other pages references it" ?

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Franck GAUTIER
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I confirm that the Odoo CMS does not apply the correct canonical link rule on category pages. Additionally, it is not possible to customize the URL slugs, so the URLs are not optimized for SEO. Furthermore, Odoo's code tends to generate 404 pages and too many nofollow pages. The Google crawl budget for an Odoo site is enormous.  Despite the tutorials and videos from Odoo explaining how to do SEO, it is clear that their approach is very basic and that we are not dealing with SEO experts at Odoo.

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Ray Carnes (ray)
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Please also review this recent webinar:


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Robbie
Author

Hey Ray,

Thanks for posting, but that video doesn't address any of the issues discussed above. Using Odoo is the single best business decision I've ever made, y'all really have transformed our business...but realistically you don't have a viable e-commerce option for companies in competitive SEO categories with high volumes of traffic.

There are numerous technical SEO issues with the way y'all have built this site. Technical SEO is an incredibly nichy subfield of SEO, and most organic SEO people don't know much about the technical side. Shopify has a couple of technical issues as well (see sources below) but it has a lot fewer issues than your platform and there are known solutions to them. The responses I've seen when these issues are brough up are talking about basic SEO best practices, not technical specifics to the underlying problems.

Again, love the product overall and tell everyone I know to use it, but I always say don't use the website builder. I do have a few websites running on Odoo for nichy side markets where SEO isn't that competitive, but for our main site that's pulling in millions of revenue in incredibly competitive SEO markets, your system wouldn't work.

If you're going to try to address these issues, it would be nice if you could get some 3rd party audits of your architecture by some reputable providers (search engine land and moz have the most reputable people) and release the audits so people can see what the issues are and how to fix them. Every platform (shopify, wordpress, etc) have some technical problems but there are known solutions to them. Your platform has more issues than the others and the solutions aren't known.

Thanks

Shopify SEO Issues:
https://searchengineland.com/technical-seo-for-shopify-a-guide-to-optimizing-your-store-for-search-engines-335251
https://moz.com/blog/shopify-seo
https://logeix.com/shopify-seo/url-structure

Ray Carnes (ray)

Understood. Just sharing the resource. We have a dozen SEO related improvements scheduled for Odoo 18. Have you already reported all of your feedback to Odoo Support?

JH

Hi @Ray Carnes (ray)

Do you have a detailed list of what's updated in Odoo 18 in terms of SEO?

The main list doesn't say much about SEO updates:
https://www.odoo.com/odoo-18-release-notes

Steven

Any update on SEO for Odoo 18 or 19?
Do they fix any of the issues raised in this thread?

Ray Carnes (ray)

The changes made to the core Website App for Odoo 18.0 are at https://github.com/odoo/odoo/commits/18.0/addons/website and you can follow the progress of the changes we are making to be rolled into Odoo 19.0 at https://github.com/odoo/odoo/commits/master/addons/website

I have not worked recently on an implementation focusing on SEO so don't know the answer to "what has changed" or "what was addressed".

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