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I've built my own CMS and I'm looking for the best way to handle pages / items deletion. Actually, pages and items were deleted and cannot be restored.

But since I have implemented a bin, I don't know how to do : 410 code is for deleted permanently. But, if the items may be restored later, is there a way to indicate this to robots?

I've heard that with 410/404 codes, we lose juice. Is there any way to avoid that?

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If a page has been deleted then it is correct to return a 410 (or 404).

If, however, it has been temporarily removed and the intention is to restore it at some point then it could be acceptable to return a 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) and preferably with a Retry-After HTTP response header indicating a date when the resource will be next available. You could do something similar if your site was down for planned maintenance and you wished to lessen the impact on search engines.

However, if a page is not going to be restored then you should ultimately return a 410.

I have heard that with 410/404 codes, we lose juice.

You are only losing link juice to the deleted page, which ... doesn't exist, so there's no page to pass link juice to anyway!?

If you don't return a 410 then search engines might hang on to the "deleted page" for an extended period of time, which might also be undesirable.

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  • Thanks for your reply (and for editing my question) ! So I'll return 410 for my pages. Ok, I thought juice was lost for all my site !
    – Hugo H
    Jan 16, 2013 at 16:17
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    @w3d "You are only losing link juice to the deleted page, which doesn't exist, so there's no page to pass link juice to anyway" So he is losing PR ("juice", if we must), assuming there were links pointed at the ex-page. If he wants to preserve that, and it makes sense from a user point of view, he could 301 to some appropriate alternative and keep his uhm... "juice".
    – GDVS
    Jan 16, 2013 at 21:28
  • @GDav: Yes, valid point.
    – MrWhite
    Jan 16, 2013 at 23:13

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