410 Gone is an HTTP status code that means the resource used to exist, has been removed deliberately, and is not expected to come back. It is more specific than 404 Not Found, which only says nothing is there now. Google documents that it treats all 4xx codes, except 429, the same way: the URL is not indexed and is crawled less over time.
410 vs 404
The HTTP specification draws the difference: 404 makes no promise about the future, 410 says the removal is permanent. In practice, search engines handle both by dropping the page. Some SEOs believe a 410 is processed slightly faster; Google has described any difference as minimal, so choose the code that honestly describes the situation and do not expect a meaningful SEO gain either way.
When to use 410
Use 410 for content you have removed on purpose with no replacement: retired features, expired promotions, spam pages created by a hack, or old thin pages you are pruning. If a page has a close replacement, a 301 to that page is usually better, because it passes users and signals on.
# nginx: return 410 for a retired section
location /legacy-templates/ {
return 410;
}What to check
Make sure the 410 response is served with a helpful page for users, with navigation and search. Remove internal links to the removed URLs and take them out of sitemaps. Search Console's Page indexing report will show them as not found while Google recrawls them.
Example
Cleaning up after a hack
Wickerpond, a booking SaaS, finds thousands of spam URLs injected into an old subfolder by a compromised plugin. After removing the plugin, the team returns 410 for that URL pattern and lets Google recrawl. The spam URLs drop out of the index over the following weeks.
Common mistakes
Using 410 when a replacement exists
If a newer page covers the same need, redirect to it instead of discarding the old URL's links.
Redirecting everything to the homepage
Google often treats mass redirects to an unrelated page as soft 404s. A clean 410 or 404 is more honest.
Questions
Yes. If it later returns a 200 with content, Google can crawl and index it again. It may take time for Google to recrawl a URL it has seen as gone.
