Crawl errors - Deleted wordpress pages should you redirect them if no backlinks

[Roboto1970]

Question answered

[Roboto1970]

Hello Logan,

Great thank you for getting back to me. I have gone through and created 410 redirects for all the old content. I guess only time will tell if this is the write solution.

Regards

Rob

[LoganRay]

Hi Rob,

Since you've got no links pointing to these pages, a 410 would be your best bet. This will get them removed from the index the quickest, and you'll start to see these errors in Search Console drop. Doing 301 redirects would also get them removed from the index, but that's also to slow down your performance, and since these pages can't be accessed other than SERPs anyway, 301s aren't going to provide much long-term value.

Here's some more info on the difference between 404s and 410s: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes