Correct usage of expired pages -410 or not?

[PropertyPortal]

Hi Mozzes,

We're running a property portal that carries around 200.000 listings in two languages. All listings are updated several times per day and when one of our ads expire we report this via the "410 Gone", and place a link to our users: This ad has expired, click here to search for similar properties.

Looking at our competition I seems that here are many different ways to deal with this, one popular being a 301 to the corresponding search result.

We've tried to get directions from Google on what method they prefere, but as usual dead silence.

Advices are mostly welcome.

[PropertyPortal]

Matthew,

How would you go about tracking user vs bot traffic on 410 header pages? We see that we got plenty of hits on the pages via Awstats, but no means to measure what sort of traffic these hits really are?

Best

Johan

[PropertyPortal]

Thanks a lot for that Matthew,

I will look into it, but my gut tells me that we do not get a lot of traffic from these pages. Google visits though, tons, so hopefully the 301s will bring us some more nice juice.

Right after posting I ran into this great post about the subject too http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

However, few words are mentionend  about the 410.

Thanks

Johan

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi Johan,

A 410 response code is perfectly acceptable for expired pages. With a 410, you are communicating that page is "gone" and expired content usually is "gone", so it fits. However, with 410 you are going to see that page fall out of the index and that page will lose traffic (assuming it would get any given that some expired content likely won't get any traffic since it is no longer timely) and, more importantly, lose link value (if you had any links to those pages).

As for 301 redirects, I'd start tracking visits to the 410 expired page and links to the 410 expired pages. How much traffic are you getting? How engaged is that traffic? How many links are there and are they good quality? Links are easy enough to track in OSE and for tracking traffic you can use Google events (http://antezeta.com/news/404-errors-google-analytics).

When I see a lot of links or a lot of traffic (especially traffic that leaves), I've converted a 410 page into a 301 redirect that goes to our best (programmatic) guess. For instance, 301 redirect the user to a search for the properties in a similar location or similar price range (or etc.). What I've often found is that when I get the the user redirected to the best page, I'm more likely to see them engage and use the site. Along with the user benefits, I've also see that help with overall organic performance when there are a lot of links back to these pages.

Hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew