Hello,

I have a related question about 301 vs 410.

I have a client who wants to delete a whole category of product from one site.  It's a big amount of product, so a big amount of urls, but this product is not working very well. So the decision is not SEO-related but more as a business decision. It's not for Panda.

If we think about the communication with the user, the best option would be to have a landing page explaining that we decided to remove that product.

Then the question is, do we do a redirect 301 of all those urls to this landing page? I am afraid that a big redirect like this, going from many urls to a single one (even if this is not created to rank on google) can be seen dodgy by Google. Am I right?

Or do I do a 410 for those pages, and I personalize the 410 landing only for these urls in order to communicate with the user (is that even possible?). But I am afraid, because we'll have much 4XX Errors in WMT, and this may have influence to the rankings!

So I don't know what to do! It's a must that we delete this content and that we communicate it well with the users.

Thanks for your help,