410 Gone — HTTP Status Code

What 410 means

RFC 9110 (Section 15.5.11) defines 410 Gone as access to the target resource no longer being available at the origin server, with that condition likely to be permanent. If the server does not know whether the removal is permanent, the RFC says 404 should be used instead.

The RFC describes 410 as a web maintenance tool: it tells the recipient the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the owner would like links to it removed. Its examples include limited-time promotions and pages belonging to people no longer associated with the site. It also says there is no obligation to mark every removed resource as gone, or to keep the 410 for any particular length of time.

When you see it

410 is almost always a deliberate choice by a site or API owner. Web servers do not send it unless configured to. Common places:

• Retired content, such as discontinued products, expired campaigns, deleted user profiles or old documentation versions.
• Deprecated API versions, where /v1/ endpoints return 410 after a published shutdown date.
• Cleanup after a hack, when spam pages injected into a site are removed and should drop out of search results.
• Legal or policy removals, although content blocked for legal reasons may use 451 instead.

410 vs 404 vs 301

For search engines, 410 and 404 both lead to a page being dropped from the index. The practical benefit of 410 is clarity: for crawlers, for API clients that can stop retrying, and for your own team reading logs.

Common causes

Unexpected 410s usually come from:

1. A broad rule that marks a whole directory as gone and catches pages that still exist.
2. CMS or e-commerce settings that return 410 for deleted or out-of-stock items automatically.
3. API sunset dates passing earlier than clients expected.
4. Old rewrite rules that outlived the cleanup they were written for.

How to fix it

If the 410 is intended, nothing is broken. Make sure there is no better destination, and update internal links and sitemaps so they no longer point to the removed URL.

To return 410 deliberately in nginx:

location ^~ /spring-sale-2025/ {
    return 410;
}

In Apache with mod_alias:

Redirect gone /spring-sale-2025

In an application, return 410 for records that were deleted rather than never existing, if you keep a record of deletions:

if (post.deletedAt) return res.status(410).render("gone");

If the 410 is not intended, search your server config, .htaccess files, CDN rules and CMS redirect plugins for the path or a pattern that matches it, and narrow the rule.

How to check it

curl -sS -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{url_effective}\n" -L https://example.com/spring-sale-2025/

Use -L so that a redirect chain ending in 410 is visible as such. Run it against a few sibling URLs to confirm the rule only covers what you meant it to.

What it means for uptime monitoring

PingRobot's checker sends a GET with the user agent PingRobot/1.0 (+https://pingrobot.io/bot), follows redirects, and counts the final response as up only if its status is 200 to 399. A 410 is reported as down.

Usually that is a monitor that has outlived its target: the page or API version was retired on purpose. Update the monitor to the replacement URL, or delete it. If a page you still rely on suddenly returns 410, treat it as a real incident, since an overly broad rule or a CMS setting is removing live content for every visitor.

Related codes

• 404 Not Found when you do not know if the absence is permanent
• 301 Moved Permanently when content has a new home
• 308 Permanent Redirect for permanent moves that keep the method
• 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons for legally required removals
• 403 Forbidden when the content exists but access is refused

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