301, 404 or 410? what is the best practice

[eminent]

Hi

I'm currently working on a project to correct some really bad practices from years of different SEO's.

Basically they had made around 1500 pages of delivery counties and town, only change 3 words on every page.

Now apart from duplicate content issues, this has really hammered the site with the latest round of Panda updates.

I've pulled the pages, but i'm in several frames of mind on how to best fix this.

The pages won't ever be used again, so i'm thinking a 410 code would be best, but reading another post: http://moz.com/community/q/server-redirect-query i'm not sure if i should just let them go to 404's if anyone ever finds them.

Incidentally i'm Disavowing over 1100 root domains, so extremely unlikely to find links out there.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Paul,

If they are unlikely to have external links to them (or at least no good ones) and they are not internally linked then I think your best bet is just to let them 404. You should anyway fix up your 404 page to let users know there has been a site redesign or similar and give links to homepage and other important pages etc.

You could 410 them also which is said to remove these pages more quickly from the index and to be a final word that these pages no longer exist and will never come back but that might create more overhead than it is worth in regards setting up different 4xx header responses for different types of pages. The differences between 404 and 410 headers in practice seems to be very little according to most things I have read. Since there will be no links to them anyway, 404ing them is an easy solution and should not create any problems.

[AlanMosley]

404, 410 it does not matter, you have removed the pages that is the main thing.

But to be correct you should use a 410, as they are gone forever, while 404 just means not found.

[eminent]

Thanks for the responses, a 410 is a lot of work for probably little gain, so i think i'll run with just leaving the 404.

I have done an analytic's check on the url's in question and 10 had a tiny bit of traffic, so for these only i'll 301 to one relevant page.

Thanks again.