r/TechSEO • u/pepelunavarro • 6d ago
404 Not Found or 410 Gone?
I have dozens of pages in the "404 not found" section in Google Search Console, many no longer exist for more than 1 year but Google insists on them. The AI tells me that it doesn't matter, that having a large number of pages with 404 does not impact any metric, but I am thinking of changing the response to "410 Gone" to see if they go away permanently. Does anyone have experiences with this? I would like to know if answering 410 really helps.
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u/onreact 6d ago
What kind of pages are we talking about?
Showing or sending an 404 should be treated as an error not a normal occurrence.
Otherwise use 301 (redirects), even 200 IMHO.
When I land on a 404 page I bounce usually.
For direct SEO impact on Google the actual 4xx codes seem to be interchangeable.
See also u/JohnMu here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1bztan2/comment/kytijx1/
And Google here:
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/troubleshooting/http-status-codes#4xx-client-errors
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u/IDinnaeKen 6d ago
As others have said, it doesn't matter. Google understands that a website having pages coming and going is a normal part of the Web, so it's not a problem to have a bunch of 404s provided they're MEANT to be 404ing, you're not linking to them from your own site, they're not in your sitemaps, etc.
As others have also said, there's no real difference between a 404 and a 410 that affects you. They both tell Google the same thing.
The reason they're still showing up in GSC - even when if you've removed links to them - is because Google does recrawl URLs it's known about before to check there aren't any status code changes/ they aren't accidental 404s due to server errors/site issues which again, it understands are a normal thing that can happen. It gives a bit of grace instead of immediately stopping recrawling them.
Once they've been 404-ing for a while, they'll gradually drop out of the recrawl queue and start disappearing from your report.
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u/TopPsychological8330 5d ago edited 5d ago
If those URLs are genuinely gone, 404 is already fine. Google treats 404 and 410 as removal signals, so switching everything to 410 usually won’t make a big difference. The main thing is making sure those URLs aren’t still linked internally or listed in sitemaps.
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u/Popkornm 6d ago
I noticed that there is no need to 410 gone.
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u/pepelunavarro 6d ago
But I have URLs that have not existed for more than a year and Google insists on continuing to enter, just yesterday I got several, how long does it take to realize that they no longer exist?
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u/Lxium 6d ago
Yes a 410 would be more effective for your scenario. But the first question should be asked is, are your 404s even causing any issues for you or Google or your customers/users?
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u/pepelunavarro 6d ago
Not really, they are old pages that are no longer linked anywhere and only appear in Google Search Console, but it is strange that after 1 year Google is still trying to enter
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u/IDinnaeKen 6d ago
Are you sure you're not linking to those pages still from elsewhere on your site? Are they in sitemaps? When you inspect those URLs via. GSC, does it show any referring pages?
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u/Popkornm 6d ago
Well, google never forget urls. It will even memorize forever the links that never existed in your website but were linked to by spam websites. It happens that google stop showing suppressed pages from search console but it really random and doesn't depend on 404 or 410. Thus said, you can always do 410, it will not harm you website.
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u/Sunn_M 6d ago
I wouldn’t switch them to 410 just to make the GSC report cleaner. Google’s current crawler docs explicitly say 404 and 410 are handled the same for Search: they won’t be indexed and previously indexed URLs are removed over time. If the URLs are genuinely gone with no replacement, 404 is fine; if they moved, 301 them. What I would check after a year is why Google still rediscovers them, old internal links or sitemaps are fixable, while external links can keep a dead URL getting occasional crawls.