You are correct that repository software may be poor for SEO – and this may be the case for other types of software, too such as CMSs.

Note that users may not necessarily be looking for an OER – they may be looking for an educational resource, and not care about its licence. An OER could be more findability than other types of educational resources, as more sites may be linking to resources with CC licences – but there’s a need to understand other barriers to SEO.

It might be more apt to look at how most repository software is very poor for SEO – failure to provide well structured URLs, poor embedding of RDFa – this is probably a bigger issue. It is hard to have any SEO if your system can’t provide it.

Fundamentally, you can’t find an OER via google, as it has no method for recording if a resource has an open licence.

I would prefer that OERs are not difficult to found using Google, thus failing to exploit the investment made in the development of OERs.

Clearly there will be many providers of OERs. I suspect that many commercial providers of OERs will have SEO strategies in place for their resources – we need to ensure that our web sites aren’t artificially optimised to appear low in Google rankings!

Would you prefer your learning materials to only be those which someone has artificially optimised so as to appear highly in google? Does that sound trustworthy? It doesn’t exactly feel scholarly.

It also assumes that the sole providers of OER are Universities. If you do any google search, Google’s algorithm is modified to prefer Wikipedia (whose every page is an OER) so they feature quite highly.