410 Gone

410 Gone tells crawlers the page is permanently removed and not coming back. 404 Not Found, by contrast, leans toward 'cannot find it right now' — engines treat it as a possibly temporary issue and keep recrawling for a while. 410 is the explicit 'stop trying' version.

Real-world 410 cases are narrow but clear: discontinued product pages, expired promo landings, posts you have permanently retired for policy reasons. Leaving those as 404 means they linger in the index longer and quietly contribute to index bloat in the meantime.

Use it sparingly. A 301 to the most relevant successor page is almost always a better user experience, and 410 is the right answer only when no successor exists. The cleanest setup is to encode the 404 vs 410 vs 301 decision into a documented page-lifecycle policy.