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Does it make sense to return a 410 instead of 404 when some page has been permanently removed? In this video, Matt Cutts says that Google treats them the same, but are there other reasons to implement a 410 (except for technical correctness)?

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Besides there being more search engines than Google out there, there's also no reason to assume that Google won't ever change the way they treat 410 responses. Indeed, it seems that's already happened: the information Matt Cutts quotes in the video is from 2007, whereas this post from 2009 by John Mu on Google's Webmaster Central forums says otherwise:

"I followed up on the 404 vs 410 thing with the team here. As mentioned by some others here & elsewhere, we have generally been treating them the same in the past.

However, after looking at how webmasters use them in practice we are now treating the 410 HTTP result code as a bit "more permanent" than a 404. So if you're absolutely sure that a page no longer exists and will never exist again, using a 410 would likely be a good thing."

So it looks like Google is now indeed treating 410 responses differently from 404s.

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up vote 8 down vote

There is more than Google in this world. A 410 unambiguously tells a bot that the file is gone. A 404 does not. A persistent bot might keep trying to find a 404 indefinitely whereas they might stop trying to find a 410 immediately which would make your server very happy.

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It goes both ways, though: a really crappy bot might only recognise 200 and 404. – Peter Taylor Feb 7 '12 at 21:56
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@Peter not sure that matters - if they are crappy and don't understand HTTP codes then what harm would it do? If you use 404 then both crappy and good bots will keep requesting the page, whereas with 410 only the crappy one will. – DisgruntledGoat Feb 7 '12 at 22:47
What @DisgruntledGoat said. See Postel's Law. Crappy implementations simply can't be accounted for; what are you going to do, try and account for all of them and each of their particular quirks, all at the same time? There are rare exceptions, like say IE6's long-standing browser domination, but in general it's simply not worth the effort. – Su' Feb 8 '12 at 5:03
up vote 2 down vote

There is more than Google in this world.

Quoted for truth. Given your requirement, to tell bots (and presumably humans as well) that a page has been permanently removed, I'd actually opt for a 301 redirect to a page explaining (if necessary) why the content was removed, or take the bot / user back to the index page.

The lesser-known HTTP error codes usually aren't as well supported, understood or implemented across the board, so I generally stick to the ones that are in order to ensure the expected and hopefully seamless browsing experience.

Choosing which option to go with is dependent on how many request are still coming through for the (now) missing content.

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Why does the need to explain the removal mean you need to 301 to a different URL with that explanation? The explanation could be on the page itself, with a 410 status so that search engines understand that it's dead. – IMSoP Sep 11 '12 at 12:03

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