In short
A 410 Gone means: this page existed, but has been deliberately and permanently removed - and will not come back. Search engines remove such addresses from their index faster than with a 404.
404 or 410 - what is the difference?
- 404 Not Found: nothing was found at the address. Whether the page is only missing temporarily or never existed remains open.
- 410 Gone: the page has been removed intentionally and for good. Search engines therefore do not keep rechecking the address but remove it promptly.
When is 410 useful?
- Discontinued products without a successor in an online shop
- Expired campaigns, job adverts or events
- Deliberately deleted content that should disappear from search results
- Addresses created by injected spam pages after an attack
If there is a suitable replacement for the removed page, a 301 redirect is the better choice - visitors then land directly on the new content.
Setting up 410 with .htaccess
Single page:
Redirect 410 /old-campaign/Several addresses by pattern, such as a whole removed section:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^archive/2019/ - [G,L]The flag [G] stands for "Gone" and returns status code 410. Many CMS and SEO plugins also offer redirect management where you can select 410 directly.
Tips
- Remove internal links to the deleted pages so visitors do not land there in the first place.
- Remove the addresses from your XML sitemap.
- Create a friendly error page for 410 as well, for example with
ErrorDocument 410 /410.html. - Check the result with
curl -I https://www.muster.de/old-campaign/.
Related status codes
- 404 Not Found - page not found
- 301 Moved Permanently - moved permanently
- All status codes at a glance