: What's the best HTTP code for dynamically deleted pages? I've built my own CMS and I'm looking for the best way to handle pages / items deletion. Actually, pages and items were deleted and

@Jamie184

If a page has been deleted then it is correct to return a 410 (or 404).

If, however, it has been temporarily removed and the intention is to restore it at some point then it could be acceptable to return a 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) and preferably with a Retry-After HTTP response header indicating a date when the resource will be next available. You could do something similar if your site was down for planned maintenance and you wished to lessen the impact on search engines.

However, if a page is not going to be restored then you should ultimately return a 410.


I have heard that with 410/404 codes, we lose juice.


You are only losing link juice to the deleted page, which ... doesn't exist, so there's no page to pass link juice to anyway!?

If you don't return a 410 then search engines might hang on to the "deleted page" for an extended period of time, which might also be undesirable.

Vote Up Vote Down