410 Gone
The resource has been permanently removed and no forwarding address exists.
Status
HTTP/1.1 410 Gone
Details
- Category: 4xx
- Status: Standard. Registered with IANA and defined by a current standards-track RFC.
- Specification: RFC 9110 §15.5.11
- Cacheable: Cacheable by default
- Response body: Allowed
- Retry: Do not retry
410 is 404 with certainty. The server is stating that the resource used to exist, is intentionally gone, and is not coming back. Clients that store links should delete them rather than keep retrying.
For crawling and indexing this matters: search engines drop 410 URLs faster than 404 URLs, which makes 410 the better choice when retiring expired listings, closed job postings, or deleted user content, provided the removal really is permanent.
Note: Search engines drop 410 URLs faster than 404s, which makes 410 the better choice when a removal is genuinely permanent and no replacement exists.
Common causes
- Content was deliberately retired, such as an expired campaign or a closed listing.
- A user deleted their account and the profile URL was tombstoned.
- An API version was decommissioned after its deprecation window.
How to fix it
As the client
- Remove the URL from queues, sitemaps, and stored references. Retrying will not help.
- For an API, move to the current version. A 410 on an endpoint means the old version was switched off.
As the server
- Use 410 rather than 404 when you want crawlers to deindex quickly and permanently.
- Use 301 instead if an equivalent replacement exists, so link value transfers.
Examples
Retiring a job listing
HTTP request
GET /jobs/2019/backend-engineer HTTP/1.1 Host: careers.example.com
HTTP response
HTTP/1.1 410 Gone Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8