What is 410 Gone?

Intent is the difference

A 404 says "I couldn't find anything here". A 410 says "something was here, we removed it deliberately and it isn't coming back". RFC 9110 frames 410 as a web-maintenance aid: it tells the recipient the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the site owner would like links to it removed. The standard's own examples are limited-time promotions and pages belonging to people no longer associated with the site.

The standard is relaxed on two points. Not every permanently removed resource has to be marked as gone, and how long to keep the mark is up to the site owner. If the server doesn't know, or has no way to determine, whether the removal is permanent, it should use 404 instead.

Does Google treat it differently?

Google's documentation says all 4xx codes except 429 are handled the same way: the crawler reports that the content doesn't exist and an indexed URL is removed. So in documented behaviour there is no difference between 410 and 404. Some practitioners report that 410 URLs drop out slightly faster, but Google makes no such promise. Choose based on meaning, not an expected SEO edge: when a removal is deliberate and permanent, 410 is the more honest answer. If deindexing is urgent, for example after sensitive content was published by mistake, the Removals tool in Search Console hides a URL from results temporarily; the lasting fix is still a 404 or 410.

When 410 is the right call

• Cleaning up after a hack: once thousands of injected spam pages are deleted, marking those paths 410 states plainly that the removal is intentional.
• Expired campaigns: seasonal landing pages that will never be reused and never earned links.
• User-deleted content: closed profiles, withdrawn listings.
• Products discontinued for good: but only when no similar replacement exists. A product that is temporarily out of stock should stay at 200 with an "out of stock" notice, a distinction at the heart of e-commerce SEO.

If a close replacement for the removed content exists, the right tool is not 410 but a 301 redirect.

Returning 410 from the server

# Nginx: an entire expired campaign folder
location ^~ /campaign-2024/ {
    return 410;
}

# Apache (.htaccess, mod_alias)
Redirect gone /old-page/

Returning the code is not the whole job: remove the URLs from the XML sitemap and from internal links as well. Otherwise the site says "this is gone for good" while still sending Google straight to it.