One wrong word in code hid 170 custom SEO titles from Google for three months

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Developer Convertify discovered that all 170 tool landing pages on his free image converter had been displaying generic fallback titles in search results since March, due to a single-word typo in the codebase. Eight Next.js route files referenced a non-existent database column called 'meta_title' instead of the correct 'title' column, causing every custom SEO title to silently fail and default to a generic template. The bug originated from copy-pasting code written for the blog section, where the column 'meta_title' does exist, into landing page files that use a different database schema. The fix took under two minutes to apply across all eight affected files, immediately unlocking three months' worth of SEO title updates for Google to crawl. The issue was discovered when the developer manually checked a page's HTML source before committing a database update and noticed the rendered title did not match what was stored.

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