404 Status Codes in Google Search Console

[lucwiesman]

Hi all,

I've noticed in Google Search Console under 'Crawl errors' -

1. Why does the status code '410' come up as an 'error' in the crawl report?

2. Why are some articles labelled as '404' error when they have been completely deleted and should be a '410' - there are roughly around 1000-2000 of these.

Thanks!

[DirkC]

1. It's listed as an error because that's what a "normal" visitor would consider this page to be if he would happen to visit it.

You don't really need to take action on it - if it's a deliberate choice and none of your pages are linking to it you can safely ignore the message. You might want to check if there are any external links pointing to the page - in that case you could check if you have a page with similar or updated content and redirect to the newer page. Check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35120?rd=1#common_url_errors#url_404 for more info

2. It's not because you delete a page that it's automatically rendering a 410 status. You control the status which is returned by your web server - you can always check the status of a page with tools like httpstatus.io. Google will simply show the status returned by your web server.

Dirk