Pull any large site's crawl logs and a real slice of bot activity is spent on URLs that died months ago. This episode cuts through the 410 versus 404 myth: the deindex-speed gap is small, but the recrawl-frequency gap is large and measurable, with one controlled experiment finding 404s crawled nearly 50% more often than 410s. We cover what each status code actually tells a crawler, why this is a Bing and AI-crawler problem too (not just Google), when to reach for 301, 410, 404, or 503, how to deploy 410 at scale across Apache, nginx, Cloudflare, WordPress, and Shopify, and what the cleanup looks like on a real platform migration.

Read the full article on the Search Agency blog: https://search.agency/blog/http-410-vs-404-deindexation ...