410 Gone

410 Gone tells the client that the resource used to exist but has been deliberately and permanently removed, and that no forwarding address is known. It looks similar to 404 in that both mean nothing is here, but 410 carries the additional, deliberate assertion that the server operator knows the resource is gone for good and wants clients, especially caches and search engine crawlers, to purge references to it rather than keep checking back.

Search engines treat 410 more decisively than 404: because it signals intentional, permanent removal rather than possible transience, crawlers tend to deindex a 410 page faster than an equivalent 404, which makes it useful for content deliberately sunset, such as an old product page, an expired promotion, or a retired blog post, rather than content that simply moved or might come back. Retired API versions are a common technical use case, letting providers signal that an endpoint is not coming back, distinctly from an endpoint that merely doesn't exist right now.

The practical rule for choosing between them: use 410 when you deliberately deleted something and want to say so explicitly; use 404 when you're not sure, when the resource may return, or when you'd rather not confirm it ever existed at all. Because 410 status is meant to be somewhat temporary as a deindexing signal, many sites revert a long-retired URL to a plain 404 after search engines have had time to process the removal.