Do 410 show in the 404 not found section in Google Webmaster Tools?
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Question: Do 410 show in the 404 not found section in Google Webmaster Tools?
Specific situation: We got rid of an entire subdomain except for a few pages that we 301'd to relevant content on our main domain. The rest return a 404 not found. These show up in our google webmaster tools as crawl errors. I was wondering since 410 is a content gone error and we intentionally want this content gone, if we switch it to 410, does Google still report it as a 404 error?
Thanks
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Hi Spencer
I'm honestly not sure if they'll show a 410 (I would assume so). I just check a bunch of profiles in my WMT tools account and didn't see any, although they are less common.
This help page and other sources from Google have always seemed to imply they don't think of them as very different, in regards to their impact on search.
If your goal is to make sure the pages return the intended codes, maybe you could keep a list and crawl them in list mode in Screaming Frog to check the response codes.
If they do show in WMT for you, let us know! I'd be interested to see confirmation of that.
-Dan
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Given the spec, a 410 for truly gone pages will be better regardless of reporting or Google.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
Sadly, from that page: "Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found), so it’s immaterial to us whether you return one or the other."
This is direct non-compliance which I can only guess is due to people unwittingly use the code incorrectly. Then again, they have allowed little errors to completely wipe out a site before.
There has been a suggestion from other engineers that it will reduce the number of Googlebot retries and 410'd page will take longer to re-index if they do reappear. http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/i70G2ZAhLmQ/neKEH4spacUJ
EDIT oops, your question. Seems Google reports all the errors it finds but I personally can not attest to seeing a 410. Here is the list of errors in the GWMT help section: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132
410 is on the list.
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