Benefit of using 410 gone over 404 ??

[bjs2010]

It seems like it takes Google Webmaster Tools to forever realize that some pages, well, are just gone.

Truth is, the 30k plus pages in 404 errors, were due to a big site URL architecture change.

I wonder, is there any benefit of using 410 GONE as a temporary measure to speed things up for this case?

Or, when would you use a 410 gone?

Thanks

[matbennett]

I had the (mis)fortune of trying to deindex nearly 2 million URLs across a couple of domains recently, so had plenty of time to play with this.

Like CleverPhD I was not able to measure any real difference in the time it took to remove a page that had been 410'd vs one that had been 404'd.

The biggest factor governing the removal of the URLs was getting all the pages recrawled.  Don't underestimate how long that can take.  We ended up creating crawlable routes back to that content to help Google keep visiting those pages and updating the results.

[CleverPhD]

The 410 is supposed to be more definitive

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

404 is "not found" vs 410 is "gone

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

10.4.11 410 Gone

The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know, or has no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed. Such an event is common for limited-time, promotional services and for resources belonging to individuals no longer working at the server's site. It is not necessary to mark all permanently unavailable resources as "gone" or to keep the mark for any length of time -- that is left to the discretion of the server owner.

That said, I had a similar issue on a site with a couple thousand pages and went with the 410, not sure it really made things disappear any faster than the 404 (that I noticed).

I just found a post from John Mueller from Google

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/qv49s4mTwNM/discussion

"In the meantime, we do treat 410s slightly differently than 404s. In particular, when we see a 404 HTTP result code, we'll want to confirm that before dropping the URL out of our search results. Using a 410 HTTP result code can help to speed that up. In practice, the time difference is just a matter of a few days, so it's not critical to return a 410 HTTP result code for URLs that are permanently removed from your website, returning a 404 is fine for that. "

So, use the 410 as a matter of a few days you may see a difference with 30k pages.

All of that said, are you sure with a site that big you would not need to 301 some of those pages.  If you have a bunch of old news items or blog posts, would you not want to redirect them to the new URLs for those same assets?  Seems like you should be able to recover some of them - at least your top traffic pages etc.

Cheers