404 vs 410 Across Search Engines

[sb1030]

We are removing a large number of URLs permanently. We care about rankings for search engines other than Google such as Yahoo-Bing, who don't even list https status 410 code option: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/spatial-data-services/status-codes-and-error-handling

Does anyone know how search engines other than Google handle 410 vs 404 status?

For pages permanently being removed John Mueller at Google has stated "From our point of view, in the mid term/long term, a 404 is the same as a 410 for us. So in both of these cases, we drop those URLs from our index.

We generally reduce crawling a little bit of those URLs so that we don’t spend too much time crawling things that we know don’t exist.

The subtle difference here is that a 410 will sometimes fall out a little bit faster than a 404. But usually, we’re talking on the order of a couple days or so. So if you’re just removing content naturally, then that’s perfectly fine to use either one."

Any information or thoughts?

Thanks

[willcritchlow]

I don't have inside information on the official answer, and have not done my own testing, but I would plump for the 410 in this situation. It's the correct answer if you know a page is never going to exist at that URL and it is common enough across the web that I would be confident it would be interpreted correctly.

I hope that helps.

[effectdigital]

Yeah the 410 seems like a good option. It could also be supplemented with X-robots no-index in the HTTP header of each URL (Meta no-index can be deployed via HTTP header if HTML is generated / inaccessible)

Info here: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag - you can scroll down to the sub-heading "Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header"

[sb1030]

Thank you both. Upon further digging in Bing's documentation they do state a 404 or 410 can be used.