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#1074 – 410 redirects via sh404sef?

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Monday, 28 September 2015 21:19 UTC

lordhelmchen

Dear support team,

I understand that sh404sef is not able to take over 410 redirects in the.htaccess file.
Normally I use 410 redirects in .htaccess to inform google that a url is gone.

Is there any way to create a 410 redirect for a gone SEFurl?

E.g.:
If I delete an article indexed by google and google tries to crawl it again the url will be shown in the 404 list inside sh404sef, I could set a redirect to a new url but where can I set a 410 redirect to inform google that this url is gone and should be deleted from the index ?

Best regards

Markus

Tuesday, 29 September 2015 08:18 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

First 404 and 410 are not redirects, they are status code. sh404SEF doesn't perform any redirect when a 404 should be rendered, it's only the HTTP status code which is set.

We don't do 410 at all and I don't see any need for that. Up until about a year about year, there was a very small difference between 410 and 404: Google would keep a 404 in the index for about 24 hours before removing them, while it'd remove 410 immediately.

Currently, they have published that they don't make any difference between 404 and 410

When you permanently remove content without intending to replace it with newer, related content, let the old URL return a 404 or 410. Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found).

from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en

Please note however than in all cases, Google has also said publicly multiple times that they will always and forever recrawl those pages, whether you declared them 404 or 410 - because they don't believe us ( -; ) and think maybe this was temporary and the page may comeback.

This means the missing page will come back in the sh404SEF 404 errors list from time to time, whatever you do. The only way to prevent that is to setup a 301 to another page.

Rgds

Tuesday, 29 September 2015 18:17 UTC

lordhelmchen

Dear support team,

great explanation, thanks for it. That 404 and 410 handled in the same way by google was really a new information for me.

May be it is really the best way the create a "this information is deleted" page and redirct the broken urls to it.

Best regards

Markus

Tuesday, 29 September 2015 18:41 UTC

wb_weeblr

May be it is really the best way the create a "this information is deleted" page and redirct the broken urls to it.

Really, no. This would be terrible because then search engines do not get a 404, so they will keep trying an waste crawl budget. You will have all those bad links all pointing at the same useless page on your site.

The good thing to do for a deleted page is simply to respond with a 404 HTTP status code and display a useful page for the visitor. This is why we designed the sh404SEF 404 page, which tries to find similar page on your site and display them for the visitor or optionally does an auto redirect.

But again: having a 404 page is good and this is what you should have. The only time you should redirect is when you have a page with a similar content, or that provides updated information.

Rgds

Wednesday, 30 September 2015 23:47 UTC

lordhelmchen

Dear support team,

oh...
I understand my fault... now I will set up the sh404sef 404 page ;-)

Best regards

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