Gone

Overview

410 Gone declares that a resource has been permanently removed and has no forwarding address. Where 404 Not Found is a vaguer "can't find it right now", 410 is a firm "it was here, we deliberately deleted it for good, and it is not coming back".

Search engines treat 410 as a stronger removal signal than 404 and drop the URL from their index faster. For content you know is retired for good, returning 410 is better for crawl budget and index hygiene.

When it happens

• Requesting an expired event page, an ended promotion, or a deleted account that will never return
• Calling an old API endpoint after it has been fully sunset
• Accessing a URL whose content was permanently purged for legal or privacy reasons (e.g. GDPR)

Request / Response example

GET /promo/summer-2019 HTTP/1.1
Host: shop.example.com
Accept: text/html

HTTP/1.1 410 Gone
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 68

<h1>410 Gone</h1>
<p>This promotion has permanently ended.</p>

In code

// Signal that a retired page is intentionally gone
app.get('/promo/summer-2019', (req, res) => {
  res.status(410).type('html').send('<h1>410 Gone</h1>');
});

location = /promo/summer-2019 {
  return 410;
}

Notes

• 410 responses are cacheable. Returning 410 for a live page by mistake can stick in caches, CDNs, and search indexes for a long time, so use it deliberately.
• If you are not certain the removal is permanent, prefer 404. Recovering (re-indexing) from a 410 takes longer.

Related status codes

Related headers

Specification