Want Google to Figure Your Error Pages Faster? Try 410 Status Code
Dealing with error pages that might keep Googlebot wondering what to do (and wasting Googlebot’s time is never a good idea for your site Google crawl rate) is a too often-discussed issue. That’s why we return to it again and again and again trying to share some tips and clarifications.
The problem is, we can’t do without them because error pages always pop up during the life of any website – it’s like some sort of an illness: all people get ill from time to time. And Google is often not very quick to figure the problem for the clear reason:
Google can never be sure you are serious about removing the page. Thus it will be trying to crawl it again and again in a hope you change your mind and get it back. This will take its time and probably will make it check fewer pages of your site.
There’s good news actually: you can make it easier for Google to understand you really want it to drop the page out and never waste time on it. Google’s John Mueller made a post on Google’s Help forum saying that in order to make the page drop faster and more permanent you can use 410 status code instead of 404:
we are now treating the 410 HTTP result code as a bit “more permanent” than a 404. So if you’re absolutely sure that a page no longer exists and will never exist again, using a 410 would likely be a good thing…
Hat tip to SERoundtable.com
Ann Smarty
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17 Responses to “Want Google to Figure Your Error Pages Faster? Try 410 Status Code”
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Ann, this is interesting. It makes me wonder how other search engines are looking at this 410 code. I’d like to hear what Yahoo and Bing think of the 410 error code before considering a change like this. Though it’s nice to know that at least Google is taking a stance on it. Hopefully the other two will soon follow.
This is a great post that falls in to organization and cleanup of our haphazard content mistakes.
Sounds like a good way of working, setting your really dropped pages to 410 instead of the standard 404. Well, everything that makes Google happy is a good thing to do, right?
Nice to hear this from Google. We always appreciate a direct message like this, too often we are left in the dark to try to decode the mysteries ourselves. Thanks for making this info available.
Great tip. I am not clear about this but it is really useful for me as newbie
Google changes its mind often
Very well said Ann. I looking for more info on 410 Status code, is this consider by yahoo & Bing also ??
Thanks for the advice Ann the engines using 410′s to signify that a page is permanently removed seems to be a great way forward for all concerned.
Still there is an another way to find 404 error pages. Signup for Google webmaster tools and validate your site. Google webmaster tools will reports your 404 error pages.
Great. I’ve been looking for a way to tell google that certain pages are gone on purpose, not just missing. Thanks for this! I would like to hear more about this and if the other big player browsers are on board with this as well.
It’s a great thing to figure out easily the error on pages faster. Thanks a lot for sharing this tip with us
That would have never occurred to me. thanks
uhmm… still dont understand… some how my broken link has PR how is that? if it dropped … does it remain give pr value for home page?
Great tips. Most of the websites got 301 problem already. Will surely check it for my self. Thanks mate
Hi nice to hear abt but it may be a problematic to apply 410 on whole site using .htaccess file for urls that whether exist or not.
# Check for HTTP/1.1 request Host header
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
# Return 410-Gone for HTTP/1.1 requests for non-existent archive files
RewriteRule ^archives/ – [G]
That will return a 410-Gone for all requests to the /archives subdirectory, whether the files exist or not. However, you won’t have a fallback to a 404 for HTTP/1.0 clients if the files still exist. The easiest fix for that is to simply rename the /archives folder on your server, which will make all those URLs go missing.
Thank you Hire PHP Developer for that handy bit of code, I’ve been searching for how to return a 410. Now I know
Much appreciated.
Its useful tips but sometimes I use Google Webmaster Tools to identify and delete the index of deleted posts.