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Megan663

: How to indicate to search engines that a website is permanently closed? Obviously when a website disappears Google etc will stop indexing it at some point, but is there some way for a web

@Megan663

Posted in: #Http

Obviously when a website disappears Google etc will stop indexing it at some point, but is there some way for a web server to provide a more formal response indicating that a website is permanently closed, such as setting it to return a particular http status code?

When I try to open in Chrome a website I closed recently I get (actual domain swapped to example.com):


This site can’t be reached

The webpage at example.com/ might be temporarily down or
it may have moved permanently to a new web address. Search Google for
example com ERR_NAME_RESOLUTION_FAILED


With the above kind of error (which may be temporary), it may take some time for search engines to stop retrying a crawl of the site before it gets deindexed. Ideally I'm interested in a way of speeding up that process.

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@Shanna517

You can use the HTTP status code 410, which stands for Gone:


The 410 (Gone) status code indicates that access to the target resource is no longer available at the origin server and that this condition is likely to be permanent.

[…]

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed.


For the human visitors you could display a message (on the 410 pages) that the site is gone and won’t come back.

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