What We Know About The 404 And 410 Status Codes Handled By Google
- 24 May, 2018
- Jason Ferry
- Status Codes
Up until now, many people are still unaware of Google’s process of handling 404 and 410 status codes. In the recently held Webmaster Hangout, John Mueller shared some important details about this topic which site owners and SEO companies will find useful.
According to Mueller, they see the 404 and 410 error codes just the same. This only means that they remove the URLs with these codes from their index. He further added that they don’t give much attention to those URLs to avoid wasting time in crawling web pages that do not exist anymore.
However, it must be noted that there’s still a subtle difference in 401 and 410 codes. When a webpage has a 404 status code, Google will wait for 24 hours before starting the removal process of the page from its index. Using 410 status code, on the other hand, speeds up the procedure of removing a webpage from Google’s index. The latter code is said to be useful after a website was hacked and thousands of spam pages have been posted.
Meanwhile, if you are going to remove an SEO content on the website, Google said that it wouldn’t really matter if you use a 404 or 410 error code especially when the content has been removed a long time ago.
This information was gathered from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-404-status/254429/. Click here to see the full story.
Aside from error codes, it’s important to check the other elements that affect the usability of your website by getting a free SEO audit. Visit our SEO company page for further details about this.