Every site eventually deletes pages. Products get discontinued, campaigns end, old posts stop being true. What most people do not realise is that the HTTP status code you return for that deleted URL is a real decision with real consequences — it determines how quickly Google removes the page from its index, whether any accumulated ranking value survives, and whether you end up with a Search Console report full of errors you cannot explain. There are three sensible options and one very common mistake.
The Three Codes, Briefly
301 Moved Permanently. The content has moved to a new URL. Send the visitor and the crawler there, and pass along most of the accumulated link equity.
404 Not Found. The page does not exist. Google will keep checking back periodically for a while, in case it returns.
410 Gone. The page existed, was deliberately removed, and is not coming back. This is a stronger, more definite version of a 404.
The functional difference between 404 and 410 is smaller than people assume but not zero. Google has confirmed it treats 410 as a slightly stronger signal and tends to drop those URLs from the index somewhat faster. Both eventually reach the same destination; 410 gets there sooner and with less recrawling in between.
The Decision, In One Rule
Redirect if there is a genuinely equivalent page. Return 410 if the content is deliberately and permanently gone. Return 404 for everything else, including URLs that never existed.
That covers almost every case. The complications come from applying it honestly.
When to Use a 301 Redirect
Use a 301 when a visitor arriving at the old URL would be satisfied by the new one. Concretely:
- You renamed a URL or restructured your site
- You merged two similar articles into one
- A product was replaced by its direct successor
- You consolidated duplicate pages onto a single canonical version
- You migrated to a new domain
The test is whether the destination answers the same question the old page did. A discontinued blue widget redirecting to the current blue widget is a good redirect. A discontinued blue widget redirecting to your homepage is not.
That last pattern deserves a specific warning. Bulk-redirecting deleted pages to the homepage is common, understandable, and wrong. Google treats redirects to an irrelevant destination as soft 404s — it recognises the destination does not match the original intent, and handles the URL as if it returned 404 anyway. You get none of the link equity you were hoping to preserve, and you give visitors a confusing experience. If there is no relevant destination, do not invent one.
If you are changing URLs rather than deleting them, the redirect is mandatory rather than optional — our guide to what an SEO slug is covers why changing a URL without one throws away everything the page had earned, and 301 vs 302 redirects covers picking the right redirect type.
When to Use 410 Gone
Use 410 when the content is intentionally removed and no equivalent exists:
- Expired job listings, event pages, or limited-time offers
- Discontinued products with no successor
- Content removed for legal or compliance reasons
- Thin or low-quality pages you are pruning deliberately
- Spam or hacked pages you are cleaning up
410 is the honest answer in all of these. It tells Google “this is gone, stop asking,” and Google generally complies faster than it would with a 404.
The pruning case is worth calling out. If you are deliberately removing low-quality content to improve overall site quality — a legitimate and often effective tactic — 410 signals intent clearly. Redirecting hundreds of pruned pages somewhere irrelevant would undo the entire point of the exercise.
When to Use 404
404 is the correct default, and it is not a problem to be fixed. This is the most persistent misconception in this area.
Use 404 for:
- URLs that never existed — typos, bad inbound links, scraped or malformed URLs
- Pages removed without a deliberate policy behind it
- Anything where you are unsure whether the content might return
404s do not harm your rankings. Google has said this repeatedly and directly. A page that returns 404 simply drops out of the index. It does not drag down the rest of your site, it does not incur a penalty, and a Search Console report showing hundreds of 404s is usually reporting normal web behaviour rather than a fault.
What does matter is 404s on URLs that should work — a broken internal link, a mistyped canonical, a page you deleted by accident. Those are worth finding and fixing. Distinguishing between the two is one of the more useful things a regular technical review does, and our SEO audit checklist covers where that check fits.
The Common Mistake: Soft 404s
The worst option is none of the three above. A soft 404 is a page that displays “not found” content to a human while returning a 200 OK status to crawlers.
This happens constantly. A CMS serves a friendly “sorry, we couldn’t find that” template but forgets to set the status code. Google receives a 200, concludes the page exists, and indexes an empty error page. Multiply that across a site and you have hundreds of indexed URLs with no content.
Google detects many of these automatically and flags them in Search Console, but detection is imperfect and inconsistent. Setting the correct status code is far more reliable than hoping Google works it out. We cover diagnosis and repair in soft 404 errors.
How to Implement Each
Apache (.htaccess)
# 301 redirect
Redirect 301 /old-page /new-page
# 410 Gone
Redirect 410 /removed-pageNginx
location = /old-page { return 301 /new-page; }
location = /removed-page { return 410; }WordPress — Redirection, Rank Math, and Yoast Premium all support 301 and 410 through the admin interface, with Rank Math offering bulk 410 assignment. Avoid stacking multiple redirect plugins; they conflict in ways that are painful to debug.
Whichever route you take, verify the actual status code rather than trusting the interface. curl -I https://yoursite.com/removed-page returns the real header in one line. Plugin settings and CDN rules disagree more often than you would expect.
What to Do After
- Update internal links. If you redirect a URL, find every internal link pointing at the old one and update it to the destination. Redirects work, but each hop adds latency and wastes crawl budget, and chains of three or four are genuinely harmful.
- Clean your XML sitemap. Removed and redirected URLs should not appear in it. A sitemap listing 404s and redirects is sending Google contradictory instructions.
- Do not request removal unnecessarily. The Removals tool in Search Console is for urgent cases — leaked private data, legal takedowns. It hides URLs temporarily rather than deindexing them, and it is not a substitute for correct status codes.
- Watch the Page Indexing report. Deliberate 410s and 404s appearing there is expected and correct. Our Google Search Console tutorial covers reading that report without panicking about normal behaviour.
- Leave redirects in place. A 301 needs to stay live long enough for Google to process it and for old inbound links to keep working — think years, not months. Removing redirects after a site migration is a reliable way to lose the traffic you just preserved.
A Quick Reference
| Situation | Code |
|---|---|
| URL changed, same content | 301 |
| Two pages merged into one | 301 |
| Product replaced by successor | 301 |
| Expired job or event listing | 410 |
| Discontinued product, no successor | 410 |
| Deliberate content pruning | 410 |
| Hacked or spam URLs removed | 410 |
| Mistyped or scraped URL | 404 |
| Unsure whether content returns | 404 |
| Anything showing an error page | Never 200 |
Choose Deliberately, Not by Default
Most sites handle deleted pages by accident — whatever the CMS does by default, or a blanket redirect rule someone added years ago. That produces homepage redirects that Google ignores, soft 404s that clutter the index, and sitemaps full of dead URLs.
The decision itself takes seconds once you know the rule: redirect to a genuine equivalent, 410 what you deliberately removed, 404 everything else, and never return 200 on an error page. Applied consistently, it keeps your index clean and your Search Console reports meaningful.
If you want a technical audit that finds the soft 404s, redirect chains, and misapplied status codes already on your site, our SEO services start there. Reach out to the team at blogthememachine.com, and subscribe to our newsletter below for more technical SEO guides like this one.
