Matt Cutt says – Google handles 404 and 410 error pages in different manner

In a recent video, Google’s head of search spam “Matt Cutt” answers a question about how Google handles 404 and 410 error status code.

Here is what he conveyed:

What is 404 and 410?

He initiated the answer by explaining what a 404 and 410 actually mean to Google. These are HTTP status codes sent by the websites, whenever a browser or a Google bot request for a page.

Google make use of these status codes to determine whether the page was not found or is permanently gone.

How Google treat when it encounters a 404 and 410 error status codes?

Matt Cutt says that Google handles 404 and 410 error pages in different manner.

During the crawling process if Google bot encounters a page and sees a 404 then they keep that page protected in their crawling system for 24 hours. This is done to avoid the removal of the page when the 404 error was unintentional.

With a 410 status code Google believes that the page has gone permanently and will never return back. In such cases Google treats a page with 410 as an error.

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