Rearranging content - 410 or 301?

Well,

I've been rearranging content on a few sites lately for customers, and I usually set up a .htaccess file having 301 redirects from old URL/URI to new one. However, sometimes there are content that are not available anymore, or have been merged into other pages, but the old URL was indexed.

Usually I serve a 410 Gone! on theese pages, since I want the search engines to remove it from their index.

However, search engines can take months in removing old links from their index which brings up the question: Should I play nice and serve 410 Gone! and loose customers which follow old links, or should I just give search engines the finger and serve a 301 back to the main page. This is obviously not correct talking semantics, however do we want to loose customers with 410 Gone! pages?

After writing this, it really hits me that i'm giving the search engines far to much credit here, of course I should serve a 301 and let the search engine figure it out by themselves.

I would love to hear some opinions on this.

Mvh,
Kim Steinhaug
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Easy Webshop - Expired NO domains

 

If you merged content, why not just point the old urls to the new common url? I think it is better to use old urls to your advantage and not just abandon them with each site redesign.

 

I totally agree. My main problem was infact redesigning client websites which earlier used framesets, where alot of pages were parts of a frameset. As I obviously didn't want theese pages in the SE-index I intered 410 Gone! response on the URLs.

However, when looking at the logfiles after a few days I noticed some traffic comming to theese urls and stopping, meaning the person didnt have it in him to manually edit the URL and go back. I guess it's only us people working on the net, and bloggers which usually do this out of the box. Sure, theese hits could be search engines and bad bots camouflaging themselves as Firefox and IE, however if it is real people I do not want to loose theese visits. On the other hand I do not want to keep entertaining the life of the URL which no longer is active, if you know what I mean.

But, as far as I can see, it's better to use 301 and let the SE sort it out, than block real uses with 410 Gone! messages.

What do you think?

Kim Steinhaug

 

I think you already answered your question. If you want to use 301 and you see them as beneficial to your site, then just use them and don't sweat over it.