404 or 410 status code after deleting a real estate listing

[MartijntenCaat]

Hi there,

We manage a website which generates an overview and detailpages of listings for several real estate agents.

When these listings have been sold, they are removed from the overview and pages. These listings appear as not found in the crawl error overview in Google Search Console. These pages appear as 404's, would changing this to 410's solve this problem? And if not, what fix could take care of this problem?

[MikeGracia]

Good answer Dirk.

I like your idea of adding valuable, relevant content to the pages Dirk, good thinking.

Personally, I'd rather Iet Google know these pages are removed intentionally and not due to errors, so 410 rather than leaving as 40.

One thing to be mindful of, though, is how much crawl budget you're willing to give to these pages. If we're talking about a lot of pages in bulk, I'd be worried how much crawl budget they'd eat up over time. As you point out, they'd likely drop in rank anyway due to loss of internal links too, so might be the cost to the crawl budget isn't worth it?.

Another solution (using your idea Dirk), would be to somehow automate the process of, when a listing is marked as sold, the listing is removed, other properties in the same area are added (as you suggest),  then some time later (month or two?), a 410 header set.

The other option would be to 301 the old pages back to the area page for the properties (perhaps with something like a bootstrap message saying the property is sold but others in the area are available). This would pass juice etc back to that page. but, of course, you'd be telling G that the page had permanently moved, which isn't quite the case.

[DirkC]

The answer from Kristen is correct. However changing 404 to 410 will just let these pages appearing as 410 in the Search Console. The fact that they are appearing is not a problem - it's just that Google wants to notify you that pages return a 4xx status. If this is intended (like in your case) you can just ignore these messages and mark them as fixed.

In your case you could as well consider another option - remove the pages from the listings but keep them published (with status 200). Update the page, indicating that the original property is sold but list some other (similar) properties as an alternative. This way, if there are external pages linking to the property page the link value doesn't get lost and if people would accidentally land on this page they still find content which could be interesting to them (as you remove the navigation links to these pages they become orphans - so little change that they will rank very high in Google)

Dirk