Developer finds silent SEO bug serving English content as multilingual pages

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A solo developer discovered that 22 out of 112 tools on his multilingual platform DukoTools were returning HTTP 200 pages that claimed to be translated but displayed English content, a deception known as a soft 404. The bug went undetected because no errors were thrown and human visitors saw seemingly normal pages, while search engine crawlers flagged the mismatch as a negative trust signal. The root cause was a hardcoded locale array duplicated across five separate files, none of which verified whether a real translation actually existed for a given tool. A silent fallback operator in the code quietly served English content whenever a translation was missing, making the problem invisible at runtime. The fix involved centralizing locale availability into a single function that checks for real translations, combined with a static generation gate and an explicit runtime guard to ensure untranslated pages return a genuine 404.

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