410 Gone
The HTTP 410 status code means a resource is gone forever.
410 Gone
implies that the resource was intentionally removed, and clients shouldn’t look for it in the future. Think of it as a more specific version of 404 Not Found
, which doesn’t imply anything about the future availability of the resource.
When in doubt, use 404.
Search engines
Search engines remove the page from their indexes upon encountering the 410 Gone
status code (generally faster than they do with 404s).