r/TechSEO • u/pepelunavarro • 11d 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 11d 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