410 Gone Error – What Does It Mean?
410 is an HTTP status code returned by the web server when the client (a browser or a crawler) requests a resource that is no longer available at the requested address. It falls under the category of ‘client errors’, which means that the error is on the client’s side, not on the server. Unlike the HTTP status code 404, which displays for non-existent or incorrect URLs, the HTTP status code 410 signifies that the server has permanently removed the previously available resource at the requested address.
For users, a 410 error essentially indicates that the webpage or file they’re trying to access has been deleted and is generally no different than a 404 error.
For search engines, the 410 HTTP status code is more definitive than the 404 response because it confirms that the absence of the resource is expected to be permanent 404 error can be temporary. For example, Google may wait around 24 hours before removing a 404 page from the index, while 410 pages may be removed immediately after crawling.
Should you use 404 or 410 for deleted pages on your website?
Here’s a statement from Google’s Matt Cutts about 404 and 410 errors, shared in one of his webmaster help videos:
It turns out webmasters shoot themselves in the foot pretty often. Pages go missing. People misconfigure sites. Sites go down. People block GoogleBot by accident.
So if you look at the entire web, the crawl team has to design to be robust against that. So with 404s, along with I think 401s and maybe 403s, if we see a page and we get a 404, we are going to protect that page for 24 hours in the crawling system.
So we sort of wait and we say, well maybe that was a transient 404. Maybe it wasn’t really intended to be a page not found.
And so in the crawling system it’ll be protected for 24 hours.If we see a 410, then the crawling system says, Ok, we assume the webmaster knows what they’re doing… so they immediately convert that 410 into an error rather than protecting it for 24 hours.
We’ll still go back and recheck and make sure those pages are really gone or maybe the pages have come back alive again.
And I wouldn’t rely on the assumption that that behavior will always be exactly the same.
And so if a page is gone it’s fine to serve a 404. If you know it’s gone for real, it’s fine to serve a 410.But we’ll design our crawling system to be robust. But if your site goes down or if you get hacked or whatever, we try to make sure that we can still find the good content whenever it’s available.