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Let's say that you come across a promising page on Google after a long hunt. "Click!" and it shows "404 Page Not Found".
Now, this 404 error code appears unexpectedly while browsing and can be disappointing. Since they can occur without a web owner's notice, it's important to prepare your website to deal with them in a timely manner.
Failing to proactively deal with missing pages or broken links on your website can lead to ramifications, both from user and search engine perspectives. Luckily, such unexpected errors can quickly be dealt with either through a 404 or a 410 status code.
In this blog, we'll dig into the details to understand the best choice between 404 vs. 410 HTTP status codes for pageless URLs. Keep reading this blog until the end, and you will know which one is best suited for your scenario and how to use the correct status code effectively.
If this question intrigues you, let’s briefly touch on the basics. In 1989, Tim Berners Lee developed HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). HTTP is the method that fetches information from a website for you.
In simple words, when you use a browser like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari to type the URL, the HTTP in the URL uses a GET request to fetch the data from the web server you are trying to load.
Based on the status, which can be either - successful, not found error, still processing, redirecting, etc., - the web server communicates this back to your client browser using response status codes of 3 digits.
If it's successfully fetched, your browser gets the data from the server and loads it on the browser's window screen.
We have briefly mentioned the error code types in this article <301 vs 308 redirect>.
Now that we understand what HTTP and response status codes are, let's understand 4xx client error response codes, specifically the 410 and 404 response codes.
When your web client browser contacts the destination server and the server finds that it can't load the page for a particular URL for multiple reasons, it returns with a 4xx error code.
404 error code is a commonly encountered one that you often come across. You certainly would have encountered "404 Not Found" memes, even if you were not a techie.
As natural as it is to catch the flu and announce a medical leave, webpages can shut down and result in error codes. That is when you get a 404 Not Found error code. But what exactly does it mean?
Four hundred four response codes are as straight as possible - the server can't find the page - that's it. To elaborate this further, you can check the MDN web docs, which states:
"A 404 status code only indicates that the resource is missing without indicating if this is temporary or permanent."
This can be due to multiple reasons, such as broken links, server down, dead link, server misconfiguration by the operator, etc.
In contrast, 410 HTTP status codes indicate that a page is missing. However, they also suggest something more than that, i.e., the page has been permanently removed or deleted.
Here's how the modern web docs describe it:
"The HTTP 410 Gone client error response status code indicates that the target resource is no longer available at the origin server and that this condition is likely to be permanent. A 410 response is cacheable by default."
While the definition above makes it crystal clear, the difference certainly deserves a little deep diving.
Knowing the difference can benefit you when you prepare your pages to deal with scenarios such as 4xx error codes. This will help you make quick and accurate decisions.
Basically, it's best to get rid of an erroneous page as quickly as possible. Why?
You don't want users to encounter that dead end and be left confused about how to proceed further, especially if your page ranks well on Google. Google surely won't appreciate disappointed surfers.
"But wait, what am I supposed to do if my server temporarily went down or someone hacked my website?"
Indeed, you don’t have control over such scenarios. You don't know when the page will return, but you are confident it will. Using 404 makes the crawler revisit the URL to check that the valuable content is back.
But if you feel that the page is permanently gone and won't ever return, the best practice is to favor the Googlebot crawler by telling it that "I'm not expecting this page to return, nor do I know where to redirect it. Feel free to remove it from your indexing".
Doing so means respecting Google's crawler budget (limited resources to crawl the internet with billions of URLs).
But here's a sneak peek at what Google thinks about using 404 or 410. This is what John Mueller says:
Credits: Reboot Online
In conclusion, using 410 code will remove the URL from the index much earlier than in the case of 404 response code, but it won't make much difference from a complete picture.
When the missing page on a URL is not purposeful, let the 404 response code be the default.
But when you want to remove a page purposefully, and it has no replacement page for a redirect, use 410.
As per Matt Cutt, Google wants to keep its algorithm robust so as not to misinterpret temporary URL page outages as a permanent error. With 404, the crawler protects the URL before removing it from the index.
So, you can use 404 in the following scenarios:
You can 410 in scenarios:
Okay, errors happen! I agree that it's natural. But what's next?
Because this is what error codes are doing:
Here's what you can do:
1. Create an attractive 404 or 410 status page that your users will love to see
2. Guide them to another page so they don't have to scratch their head (check the example above).
From the SEO perspective, ask yourself:
You can use tools like Semrush to analyze these factors and improve your SEO score.
404 and 410 status codes are standard error codes that Google hardly differentiates between. This blog mentions how they differentiate to help you choose the correct HTTP code for your erroneous URLs so that the crawlers and surfers are rightly guided for a good SEO.
