Redirect 301 or 410

[Name Trader]

Will a Redirect 410 permanently remove a page from a search engine, or is it always better to do a Redirect 301 to an existing page (even if it's not relevant).

 

[Peter]

a 410 is not a redirect it states that the content is permanently gone. I personally would use a custom 404 page. This way you can convey that the page is no longer there as well as keep visitors on your site.

The use a of a 301 would in my opinion be a bad idea is the new source page is totally irrelevant to the original

 

[Name Trader]

I've rearranged my site and dropped some subjects (pages). So those subjects on those pages dropped are no longer relevant.

I've seen a lot of advice (mostly positive) about using 301's. But I don't think they are the most appropriate for this case. 410 definitely is more to the point. However, I read a lot of comments that the search engines pick up these 301's quickly, re-index the new page and drop the old. I read practically nothing about how search engines handle the 410's. Do they drop those indexed pages?

Your point about keeping any visitor on the site is well taken. A 404 error page would work for visitors best. However there are probably no direct visitors to these pages. I'd just like to get them purged from the search engines. How is the best way to do this without having to manually submit each page for deletion (too time consuming).

 

[Peter]

well when a search engine visits a page that reports a 404 then they will drop it. A search engine handles error pages the way it wishes. Just because a certain error code means a certain thing does not necessarily mean that a search engine will carry out that behavior.

 

[Name Trader]

I thought that with an Error 404 Google still maintained the page in their cache but flagged it as an Something(?) Result.