Dealing with 410 Errors in Google Webmaster Tools

[CleverPhD]

Hey there!

(Background) We are doing a content audit on a site with 1,000s of articles, some going back to the early 2000s.  There is some content that was duplicated from other sites, does not have any external links to it and gets little or no traffic.

As we weed these out we set them to 410 to let the Goog know that this is not an error, we are getting rid of them on purpose and so the Goog should too.

As expected, we now see the 410 errors in the Crawl report in Google Webmaster Tools.

(Question) I have been going through and "Marking as Fixed" in GWT to clear out my console of these pages, but I am wondering if it would be better to just ignore them and let them clear out of GWT on their own.   They are "fixed" in the 410 way as I intended and I am betting Google means fixed as being they show a 200 (if that makes sense).

Any opinions on the best way to handle this?

Thx!

[TakeshiYoung]

Having the errors in Webmaster Tools is not going to negatively impact your SEO in any way. It's more of a heads up to you, the webmaster, that they have found a page that is missing.

As long as there are no internal or external links to those pages, they should disappear automatically, although it could take months. If you don't want the errors cluttering up your report, then manually marking them as fixed is the way to go.

[CleverPhD]

Thanks!