Does Google treat 404 and 410 status codes differently?

What people said

Recommends Goyllo · 2016-09 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “404 errors still showing in Webmaster Tools”

Let me tell you one thing, Google index your site it means google save your webpages into their databases, now they regularly check your website in order to update their database. Google does not just rely on your sitemap, or who links to you. Once they index your webpages, they start crawling same webpage again and again from their databases, no matter if you change your sitemap or remove all of the links that point to that webpage. 404 not found error not going to help you, because Google assume that, this webpage is not found, but may be, it will available in future. Google removal tool also has some limitation(I think 90 days) after that (or may be earlier), they will start doing same th

Recommends Goyllo · 2017-06 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Will it hurt my site if there are crawl errors on a new domain that had been previously registered?”

1) Will this affect my SEO? No it will not affect your SEO. Many domain names are registered and expired in daily basis, so Google already know that you're the new webmaster(From who is [LINK] data also from your google search console account name, also by checking past content vs new content). 2) How to remove those broken links which do not currently exist. I marked them as fixed but after few days they again appear. When Google see 404 link not found status/error code, then Google assume may be that content will come back after some time. So they wait for a long time. The time is not fix, but the search console data is lazzy, Google may already drop that links into search result, but they

Recommends Alexis Wilke · 2020-06 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Unpublishing content from google index”

As the other two mentioned, you probably want to consider using 301 to drive the juice to your new site if you do not want to keep the old site. It is also possible to change the canonical URL [LINK] . In the old site you add that entry to your headers that need to point to the new site. Either way, if your pages have completely new URL paths, it's not going to be possible to automate the process. That means editing each page on the old site. If you have a few hundred, already, it's not going to be a lot of fun, is it? (You have the same issue with a 301, though) Otherwise, Google will automatically de-index a site which is not accessible anymore. i.e. remove the domain name from the DNS fro

Cites Simon Hayter · 2015-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Can an HTTP status 400 be a substitute for a 410?”

Why 410 gone? Since the page once existed the correct header status return would be 410 gone [LINK] , this will inform Google and other search engines to drop the page from its index. You should avoid using status 400 bad request [LINK] since this implies the server did not understand the request due to malformed syntax. Using undesirable status codes will populate your error logs and can make fault finding harder on actual issues. What about 404? Using either a 404 or 410 statuses is considered ok, however… if you know the page is never coming back then its best to use a 410 gone. Google has said that they treat the outcome of 404 and 410 the same but the 410 is dropped quicker [this video] due

Cites Nicolas Guérinet · 2015-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Can a website meet standards without a single link returning 404 status?”

According to Google & in the context of SEO, In case of 404, the page is retained 24 hours before being considered as deleted. In case of 410, the page is considered as deleted right away. I guess for a big online shop it can make a difference for product pages that are gone. If the product are discontinued a 410 would be normal. In fact, it is possible to code 410 http codes for a category of pages in wordpress using php or the 410 plugin. reference from Google: [this video]

Cites Goyllo · 2016-12 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How to remove non-existent sitelinks?”

Yes, Google show it for few months, because other people reading it from cached result page. It's not my assumption, I have seen it. For reference you can watch this matt cutts video [this video] .

Cites Milica Ristic SEO · 2017-12 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Soft 404 errors cause ranking drop or penalty?”

404 will not influence your positions on SERP, but you should fix soft 404 by sending proper response code. How Google treats 404s and 410s, you can see at Matt Cutts video: [this video] About your dropping, conduct an audit of your backlinks . Take a deep dive into whats going on out there: spammy websites, dead websites, over optimized anchor texts (you should check on site internal linking anchors too). After you find all the bad guys in your backlink profile, submit them to Google by using Disavow Tool. If you got penalized by Algorithm Update , to recover will take some time: Panda Update - roll out once a month - you should improve website usability and content quality - it will take month

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 [this video] and more recently John Mueller also covered it [LINK] .