SEO question for community (410 error)

Hi guys,
There is anyone can answer this question:

All here we publish content across the web but after some time or for necessity we remove/delete pages or posts from our web. Ok, Google return a 404 error with “not found”, but this error in most cases not disappear from GWebmaster nor either from serps (unless to do a redirect).

So, I want to redirect my deleted pages/posts to an 410 “gone” (of course without plugins)

• I create an simple archive called 410.php with this content because I want to return a 410 header response:
  <?php
header("HTTP/1.0 410 Gone");
?>
The requested page has been removed.
• I add new rules to my htaccess like so:
  redirect 410 /mypostdeleted1/
  redirect 410 /mypostdeleted2/
  ErrorDocument 410 /410.php

¿Is the right way? ¿Is posible to personalize this page 410 like 404.php doing a clone?

Best regards

Hi

You can try to regenerate your sitemap and submit it again to google after you delete some posts/pages. The errors won’t dis-spear immediately from webmaster console because google need some times until will re-index the site again.
Yes you could do a clone for 404 page but to achieve that you will need a bit of codding. In general you could use the same code as for 404 page and change/customize the layout where you thing is needed.

Thanks!

Actually better to do a 301 redirect to the category index the post used to live in for SEO.

Hi Andrei,
Hi Chris,

I opted for the best solution I think… (I switch from Yoast free to premium)

• submitting the sitemap won’t work for this (this practice works only to remove some warning related with the sitemap itself). Believe me, the 404s come back even if it’s been years (and I talk about links that are wholly obsolete and dead without internal/external baklinks or suchlike)
• the permanent redirect I dont think that is the right solution for my case because the user experience is not so friendly and the bounce rate grow up (the pages/posts that I want to get rid have nothing to do with my actual content).

Anyway, thanks to both for the feedback,
Regards

Hi, Nalrof.

How exactly did you get rid of the 404 errors?
I use Yoast Premium too. 🙂

Hi @arved007,
In my case, most the 404 errors I had to remove them (410 instead of 404).
In the tab redirects from the plugin, select the desired type of redirection (301, 302, 307, 410, 451) and insert the old link.
This process can take several weeks until Google remove them from the Serp’s (you have to be aware of GW to mark this errors like fixed to be archived).

Don’t forget that is better a permanent 301 redirect if possible, instead of 410.

*Be careful what you’re doing, if in doubt, better make use of Yoast premium support directly from your backend.

Regards.

I actually used the Yoast Premium to do a 410 error recently for just this use case. Worked pretty well, as there was nothing to redirect to, and better in this sense than 404.

Yep, and is through php
Also seems that a little modification into td-speed-booster.php did the trick whit the permission (wp-seo.php to wp-seo-premium.php in “private $allowed_plugins” and works like a charm).

For the moment it seems that we are only 3 users from 28000 using the Yoast plugin in the premium version (very very strange!)

I hope that developers make this version (premium) compatible with his plugin Speed Booster by default.

• This reply was modified 9 years by nairolf.

I’m actually not using the speed booster plugin anymore myself; I’m now doing this

Switch from VC to TD Composer beta, and:

a) Scripts to Footer plugin
b) generate and insert critical CSS in header.php
c) de-enqueue main style.css in functions.php
d) manually add link to minified style.css in footer.php

In my case this works very well; especially with fast server, all other optimizations, and with mod_pagspeed running very quick (it’s off right now as bug in last release for our server, waiting for next stable version any day now …)

I will do a tutorial on this at some point …

• This reply was modified 9 years by simchris.

Sounds good, but I don’t have the courage to be beta tester on real enviroment 🙂
In this project I use only the theme & 3 plugins (speed-booster, VC and Yoast premium) on VPS server 4G DDR4, 3×3.5Ghz Xeon E5, and I have to admit that I’m very surprised for the speed: 0,4 sec. and 98-99 pts. in Google PageSpeed Insights for both devices and for all pages (of course, optimized images 🙂 ).
Sincerely, as I am right now, I’m super super satisfied with the performance (in none of my other sites I have this score). Over the years I’ve learned something, when something works well, don’t change!

By the way @neotrope, all the best for your work, contributions and selfless help in this forum!
My respect