Send noindex, noarchive with 410?

[tonyperez]

My classifieds site returns a 410 along with an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header set to "noindex,noarchive" for vehicles that are no longer for sale.  Google, however, apparently refuses to drop these vehicles from their index (at least as reported in GWT).  By returning a "noindex,noarchive" directive, am I effectively telling the bots "yeah, this is a 410 but don't record the fact that this is a 410", thus effectively canceling out the intended effect of the 410?

[mememax]

hey Tony you made it in the right way, you added the error code + the noindex. However google won't drop your page from the index until it crawls it several times.

You can do this: first of all be sure that you have no links pointing to that page then:

• see in GWT if the page is showing as a 404 and when it will disappear from GWTools errors
• or go to GWT and ask google to remove it from the index. This is the fastest way, and google asks you to add a noindex or return a 404 to make this action, so actually you're more than fine to do that, however it depends on the volume of 404s you have this may be a huge and repetitive task to do.

[tonyperez]

Thanks for the info, mememax.  I don't relish the thought of using the removal tool, but I suppose I can actually 301-redirect many of those 410s to category pages and then use the GWT for the rest.

[mememax]

That sounds good, let me know if you have further questions, I'm always glad to be of help!