404 vs 410 Across Search Engines
-
We are removing a large number of URLs permanently. We care about rankings for search engines other than Google such as Yahoo-Bing, who don't even list https status 410 code option: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/spatial-data-services/status-codes-and-error-handling
Does anyone know how search engines other than Google handle 410 vs 404 status?
For pages permanently being removed John Mueller at Google has stated "From our point of view, in the mid term/long term, a 404 is the same as a 410 for us. So in both of these cases, we drop those URLs from our index.
We generally reduce crawling a little bit of those URLs so that we don’t spend too much time crawling things that we know don’t exist.
The subtle difference here is that a 410 will sometimes fall out a little bit faster than a 404. But usually, we’re talking on the order of a couple days or so. So if you’re just removing content naturally, then that’s perfectly fine to use either one."
Any information or thoughts?
Thanks
-
Thank you both. Upon further digging in Bing's documentation they do state a 404 or 410 can be used.
-
Yeah the 410 seems like a good option. It could also be supplemented with X-robots no-index in the HTTP header of each URL (Meta no-index can be deployed via HTTP header if HTML is generated / inaccessible)
Info here: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag - you can scroll down to the sub-heading "Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header"
-
I don't have inside information on the official answer, and have not done my own testing, but I would plump for the 410 in this situation. It's the correct answer if you know a page is never going to exist at that URL and it is common enough across the web that I would be confident it would be interpreted correctly.
I hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google News error in Google Search Console
My google search console states some errors as below: 1. Article fragmented Some of the urls in this error are the category urls. How to make google bot understand it is a category not an article? 2. Article too short In fact the article is quite long. I do not know why this is happen... 3. No sentence found In fact, there are a lot of sentences Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Two websites vs each other owned by same company
My client owns a brand and came to me with two ecommerce websites. One website sells his specific brand product and the other sells general products in his niche (including his branded product). Question is my client wants to rank each website for basically the same set of keywords. We have two choices I'd like feedback on- Choice 1 is to rank both websites for same keyword groupings so even if they are both on page 1 of the serps then they take up more real estate and share of voice. are there any negative possibilities here? Choice 2 is to recommend a shift in the position of the general industry website to bring it further away from the industry niche by focusing on different keywords so they don't compete with each other in the serps. I'm for choice 1, what about you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Search console, duplicate content and Moz
Hi, Working on a site that has duplicate content in the following manner: http://domain.com/content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulneuteboom
http://www.domain.com/content Question: would telling search console to treat one of them as the primary site also stop Moz from seeing this as duplicate content? Thanks in advance, Best, Paul. http0 -
Location.href vs href?
I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?
Hi, Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site? is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404? Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Canonical link vs root domain
I have a wordpress website installed on http://domain.com/home/ instead of http://domain.com - Does it matter whether I leave it that way with a canonical link from the domain.com to the domain.com/home/ or should I move the wordpress files and database to the root domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JosephFrost0 -
404 in google webmaster tool
I have redesigned my website with new web address over 6 months ago and in the google webmaster tools it still shows my old urls with a reponse code 404 and still crawls those pages. How do I make sure they don't appear anymore in the webmaster tool and don't get crawled anymore ? or should I do a re-direct ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Sub domain versus separate domains, which is better for Search engine purposes?
We are pitching to a hotel client to build two new websites, a summer website and a winter website, two completely different looking websites. The client wants to automatically switch their domain name to point to one or the other, depending on the time of year. The customer does not want to use a landing page where you would choose which site to visit; they want the domain name to go directly to the relevant website. Our options: Set up two new domain names and optimise each website based on the holiday season and facilities offered at that time of year. Then change the exisiting domain name to point at the website that is in season. Or Use the existing domain name and setup two sub domains, switching the home page as necessary. We have been chewing this one over for a couple of days, the concern that we have with both options is loss of search visibility. The current website performs well in search engines, it has a home page rank of 4 and sub-pages ranking 2 and 3’s, when we point the domain at the summer site (the client only has a winter website at present) then we will lose all of the search engine benefits already gained. The new summer content will be significantly different to the winter content. We then work hard for six months optimising the summer site and switch back to the Winter site, the content will be wrong. Maybe because it's Friday afternoon we cannot see the light for the smoke of the cars leaving the car park for the weekend, or maybe there is no right or wrong approach. Is there another option? Are we not seeing the wood for the trees? Your comments highly welcome. Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill-Duff0