301 vs. 404 vs. 410 which one to Choose?

301, 404 or 410 are not telephone area codes; they are web server status codes. To most people they have no idea what “the status codes” 301, 404 or 410 mean. Frankly to most business owners they may have never even heard of a server status code. Yet, to Search Engine Optimization specialists and server managers these codes are a critical function of successful websites. How and when each one is utilized can have a major impact on how your site performs and how it will rank in organic search results. As a business owner or manager, it’s up to you to know the difference and ensure they are used correctly.

The 3 status codes mentioned above play a critical role that can either help or sink your website when used incorrectly. They generally come into play after a site redesign or when content is deleted from your site. This is information that your website passes onto the search engines about each and every page they come to evaluate. To understand their importance let’s examine each one on its own.

404
404 simply states “Page Not” found. This is an “Error Code” that the page a website visitor has tried to access or that the search engines bots has come to index (evaluate) isn’t there at the present URL and this particular moment. This can be caused by errors in a link to a page, a mistyped URL or perhaps a webpage that was deleted for some particular reason. We should all be familiar with this as conventional wisdom has most web developers creating a custom 404 error page for human visitors which tells them a story on why the page isn’t there and might even direct them to another page on the site.

In itself there is nothing wrong with generating a 404 error (for example when a server is down). When it comes to search engine bots and if large segments of your site were recently deleted, they can cause server issues. To the search engine the page is simply not there at this moment (if your site is down for technical reasons something you want) and they’ll come back to it many times before deleting it from their index of pages. Until then, you might experience a higher then usual load on your servers caused by the search engine bots coming to see if the page is still missing. If a large number of pages were deleted at the same time, this can put a huge load on your server slowing down overall response time. Response time is one of the key factors that the search engines use to rank sites.

The above image shows a site where a significant number of pages were removed from the site both in mid April and again in late May. Notice, how many more pages were being crawled by search engines on a daily basis once those pages were deleted and only a 404 error was generated. A close inspection of server logs, showed that this increase was primarily multiple calls to the pages that had been deleted. The next image shows the impact on page load speed (as reported by Google) over the same period with page load speeds more than doubling from before pages were being removed.

The consequences of this, was a significant drop in average search position for the site within days. The next two status codes provide better alternatives then to simply remove content and generate a 404 error.

301
301 states the page was permanently moved to a new URL. Conventional SEO wisdom states that this is the code you should use whenever a page is moved to a new URL or if content has been removed and to point the old URL to an equivalent new page. The reason SEOs love this status code is that by using a redirect any SEO value of external links to the page will be transferred to the new page.

By implementing a 301 code, the search engine bots generally will only come once and then update their index with the new URL. To the human user, they are taken to the new URL without ever experiencing an error, also an ideal situation.

The only downside of using 301 errors is what to do when there is a massive site redesign where there are hundreds of pages moved, combined or deleted. Ideally each page needs to be address and sometime it just doesn’t make sense to simply redirect large number of pages, when there is no new equivalent, to the site’s home page or to another page as that’s not what the user is expecting. This can cause confusion and a confused user is an unhappy user. This is where the 410 Status/Error code comes into play.

410
The 410 error code simply states that the page is “Gone”. The page is no longer available and will not be returning. To the search engine bots, this means “I don’t have to keep coming back, I’ll update my index” and your site won’t experience repeated bot crawls as they keep checking to see if the page has come back.

For your website users, this gives you the opportunity to create a custom error message (similar to the 404 error), that addresses why the content is gone and then can direct the user to an appropriate alternative within the site.

Ultimately, it is up to you if you have the resources to properly redirect removed pages to an appropriate alternative page on your site with a 301 redirect. If not, do not simply delete it and serve up a 404 error as it can and most likely will have a negative impact on your server and your organic search traffic, instead embrace the 410 error code and leverage its power.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/301-vs-404-410-which-one-choose-alan-k-necht/