Hello,
Thank you for contacting the support, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
The purpose of 410 is to indicate that a certain page is permanently gone so it is safe to delete that page from your website.
With that said, Google will still detect the redirection (if this is what you wanted). Please see the screenshot I inserted in the Sensitive Data section.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for getting back to me on this.
I’m sorry…still a bit confused by your screenshot.
I think my question wasn’t clear:
So AFTER I’ve set a 410 on my site…I can actually delete the page…and Google will still know that it’s been 410’d??
What do I do for 301?
And why does your screenshot show a 301? Because I haven’t deleted it?
Thanks 🙂
Ken
Hello,
Thank you for following up.
The 301 appeared since the URL you have provided doesn’t seem to have the trailing slash / on the end, and your permalinks structure for your URLs seem to have one.
However, the 410 redirects should only run on your URLs, so it is safe to delete the page/post. Its purpose is to let Google or visitors know that the page is already deleted, and not missing (404 error page not found) on your site.
I hope that clears your confusion.
Thank you, and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance.
Hi Reinelle,
So….Google still has a ‘record’ of the 410 deletion after the actual page is gone? Is this due to the fact that the actual site is still up and active?
I’m setting the 410 ON THE ACTUAL PAGE so how does Google ‘see’ that after it’s deleted?
You see what I’m trying to understand here? I’m trying to get a full understanding for my future reference.
Also, you used this URL to show me the status: https://i.rankmath.com/JrY5lL
What service are you using to show you this?
Thanks for your patience on this.
Ken
Hello,
Allow me to give an example: for instance if you had a page indexed and showing up on SERPs then you had to delete on your site, Google will still have a cache of this URL. The header status it receives when trying to update the cached URL are used to determine if the page should be kept longer (in case it is still available) or gradually discarded(if set to deleted/unavailable).
By default, every page does give a certain status code. You can check the status of any URL using this tool: https://httpstatus.io.
This article: https://httpstatus.io/http-status-codes describes the different available status codes and what they tell they tell anyone or bots trying to access this.
Hope this helps you. Thanks
Hi Michael,
Ok…I understand.
I started figuring this was the case. It’s actually fascinating in a way.
So let me ask you 2 questions if I may on redirects:
1. Redirect a page to another page on the same site: When I 301 a page to another location, do I leave the source page ‘up’ or delete it right away, later or never?
2. Redirect a page to a page on a different site/domain: Same questions.
Thank you a bunch for your patience on this!
Ken
Hello,
Thank you for the follow up.
301 shows that a page has been moved permanently. This is normally used when you have changed your page permalink slug for example from https://rankmath.com/test-page to https://rankmath.com/new-test-page. It can also used when a page has been removed/deleted but you want to have users to be redirected to another page.
As you may have noted, or you will if not, 410 redirections don’t have a destination URL. 301 on the other hand do have a destination URL. When a page is redirected this way, if the source URL had ranking data, this data is redirected to the destination URL.
To delete the source page or not is completely optional. You can redirect an existing page or even a deleted page with this to a different site or same site, all the same.
This article can be helpful: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-creating-redirects-in-wordpress/
Hope this clears your issue. Thanks
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
