410 Gone

A 410 is the strongest way to tell search engines that a URL is dead on purpose. Per RFC 9110 (as documented by MDN), you return it when the resource is gone and the removal is likely permanent, and you use 404 when you are not sure whether the page might come back. A 410 response is cacheable by default, and the standard advises removing or replacing any links that still point to it.

410 vs 404 for Google

Google’s current Search Central documentation says all 4xx errors except 429 are treated the same: a previously indexed URL gets dropped from the index, newly seen error pages are not processed, and crawl frequency gradually falls off. Older guidance from Google (circa 2014) suggested 410 deindexed slightly faster than the roughly 24-hour grace period given to a 404, but the current docs no longer draw that line, so treat both as reliable deindexing signals rather than expecting 410 to work magic.

Use 410 for content you deleted for good: expired promotions, discontinued products with no replacement, or spam and hacked URLs you want purged. Serve the real status code, not a 200 on an empty page (a soft 404), which keeps dead URLs lingering in the index.

location = /old-promo { return 410; }