How Google Handles 404 and 410 Status Codes Matt Cutts Explanation

How Google Handles 404 and 410 Status Codes Matt Cutts Explanation

Its know that both 404 and 410 are errors for a web page not available. However, 410 is defined as the web page is gone forever.

Google handles these errors in the same way, with slight differences.

With 404 error code, and other 4xx status codes, Google will protect that webpage for about 24hrs and not mark it as permanently removed.

With 410 error code, Google will immediately mark the webpage as gone as soon as it receives the status code.

Matt also said that, though in case of 410, the webpage being marked as gone, Google will go back and check whether those pages are really gone.

Simply, 410 is marked as removed and 404 are not for 24hrs.

Note: We are not sure whether this will continue as a process, as Google might change the algo and could read the 410 as permanently removed and may not crawl again to check for the same webpage availability. So, its always better to use 404 for page not found.

Video explanation by Matt Cutt's on the same: