English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout
Why Webmasters Stack Exchange recommends it
Webmasters Stack Exchange answerers cite it as a primary source, mainly for John Mueller's statement that Google treats 404 and 410 responses essentially the same when dropping URLs from its index.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2013 to 2019.
What it is
A recorded Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout from May 2018 on YouTube Live, where Google Search Central staff answer webmaster questions about crawling, indexing, sitemaps, Search Console and related topics. It runs close to an hour in a Q&A format.
What people said
Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2013-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Do subdomains help/hurt SEO?”
2007: Here what Google's Matt Cutts has to say about sub-domains vs folders [LINK] : My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site. 2012: Here is what Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz says about sub-dom
Cites Zhaph - Ben Duguid · 2019-02 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Remove a site from Google search once it has been retired and shut down”
If your site is still available and you're still in control of the domain, the quickest way to delist it would be to set up the server to return a status code of 410 - Gone . That should delist it fairly quickly and you can then turn off the hosting. Google's crawler will treat the 410 status code as a more deliberate removal status and remove the pages from their index quicker than 404s or unresolved domains. Matt Cutts discussed this here [LINK] and more recently John Mueller also covered it [this video] .
Cites Emirodgar · 2019-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Is it good to put X-Robots-Tag for 410 pages which are still in Google's Index?”
No, there is no need for that. As John Mueller said [this video] in Webmasters central From our point of view, in the mid term/long term, a 404 is the same as a 410 for us. So in both of these cases, we drop those URLs from our index. It is normal if Google stills crawl those URLs from time to time: We’ll still go back and recheck and make sure those pages are really gone or maybe the pages have come back alive again. If those pages are still indexed it could be because they don't have much popularity and Googlebot doesn't crawl them very often. Just wait or use the Remove URLs tool [LINK] to speed up the process.
Cites Emirodgar · 2019-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Remove hacked url from google index not working”
As Jonh Mueller said last year [this video] : From our point of view, in the mid term/long term, a 404 is the same as a 410 for us. So in both of these cases, we drop those URLs from our index. We generally reduce crawling a little bit of those URLs so that we don’t spend too much time crawling things that we know don’t exist. If they delayed the crawling to your 404's pages , it might explain why it's taking so much time to be dropped from Google's index. That happens on sites with thousands of URLs and it could take months in order to let Google crawl and delete all of them. You've been told to use 410 instead of 404 and that's something I've recommended in the past but I believe that, in this