GWT does not play nice with 410 status code approach to expire content? Use 301s?

[petersocapro]

We have been diligently managing our index size in Google for our sites and are returning a 410 status code for pages that we no longer consider "up-to-date" but still carry value for users to access to have Google remove them from our index to keep it lean.

However we have been receiving GWT warning across sites because of the 410 status codes Google is encountering which makes us nervous that Google could interpret this approach as a lack of quality of our site.

Does anyone have a view if the 410 approach is the right approach for the given example or if we should consider maybe simply using 301s or another status code to keep our GWT errors clean?

Further notes

• there is hardly ever any link juice being sent to those pages so it is not like we are missing out on that
• the pages for which we return 410 are also marked as noindex and nofollow

[AlexMcKee]

410 means "Gone" and is used to indicate a resource no longer exists. If it exists use 200 (OK). If it is out-dated place a notice to that effect but still leave it as 200. Putting a noindex instruction in the robots meta element should be sufficient to remove it from the Google index, though it may take some time. Nofollow is probably not what you want to do as this will destroy any link value flowing through those pages. If it is so out-dated that it is considered valueless then it should be deleted and 410'd. A 301 redirect can be used where a new resource that substantially replaces the old resource has been created.

Not sure why you would want to keep Google's index of your site 'lean' unless you have a lot of resources competing for the same keywords and are concerned about cannibalization.