410 error codes

[casionmark]

Hi -

What is the best thing to do with a 410 error code? I have a lot on my site I've just found. Do they negatively affect SEO?

Thanks,
Mark

[Triple7]

410 is the code to let Google know you've deleted some content.

Google is supposed to prefer a website that deletes old, outdated and irrelevant content to a website providing this content. But, perhaps that's theory.

[xecutable]

Yah it's just a theory, YOAST plugin does it, but that doesnt stop google to report 404 in your console 9 months after you have deleted the content and have changed the sitemaps. It crawls mysteriously non-existing sitemaps, expired domains idk, things that should be impossible.

[allfreechips]

Google should tell you the link that is pointing at the 404 Page...

[xecutable]

Google should tell you the link that is pointing at the 404 Page...

For me it does. A non-existing sitemap, meaning the one I have replaced 9 months ago, and a bunch of other post I had tagged as low quality and deleted.

[allfreechips]

make sure in WMT that sitemap is removed, and if you know where its coming from and no longer valid its not an issue.

[happydnn]

Can you do 301 with regEx ? Google will stop crawling them after few month, this is not so important, but today you loose some budget crawl.

[Garry Mosser]

server load

Hi -

What is the best thing to do with a 410 error code? I have a lot on my site I've just found. Do they negatively affect SEO?

Thanks,
Mark

I would advise you to stop generating more and more pages with 410 error code at your xml sitemap at first place, you are wasting crawl budget and making pointless server load. 410 would not directly affect your ranking but it may affect in your case indexation, as google will waste crawl on 410 pages and not crawling and indexing new pages with great content.

[casionmark]

Ok - just following up on this. I've just noticed in search console that i have an /attachment-sitemap.xml that I think was generated from the YOAST bug a few months back. I fixed it at the time but it appears to still be picked up by Google. It reports 800 files submitted and only 3 indexed. If I remember correctly the bug fix meant all the URLs in that site map return a 401. So ... presumably I don't need that /attachment-sitemap.xml any more. How do i get rid of it? Stop google picking it up?

[Online Poker America]

Hi,

Its best not to have any errors, it definitely affects traffic to your site and ofcourse SEO - this can be solved by downloading some plug-ins. There are quite a number of good forums on here that have great recommendations to certain plug-ins.


Hope this helps,

Good luck!