410 Gone

What 410 means

A deliberate, permanent 404. It tells clients and search engines to stop asking and to remove links or cached copies.

Use it for retired API versions, expired shares and deleted content where you want crawlers to drop the URL quickly.

Common causes

• Content intentionally removed.
• An expiring link past its expiry date.
• A deprecated API endpoint switched off.

How to fix it

• Nothing to fix on the client. On the server, keep returning 410 rather than reviving the URL for something unrelated.

What it looks like

A typical response:

HTTP/1.1 410 Gone
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

The same event in an nginx access log (the status is the number after the request line):

203.0.113.7 - - [10/Sep/2026:10:12:01 +0000] "GET /api/orders HTTP/1.1" 410 153 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

Check it with curl

-i prints the status line and headers, and -w '%{http_code}' prints only the number, which is handy in scripts and health checks. Replace the URL with yours:

curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{time_total}s\n' https://example.com/api/orders

Compare what curl sees with what the browser sees. A different status from the same URL usually means a cache, a CDN edge or a cookie is in the way.

Investigating a run of 410s? Paste the log excerpt into Log Share to get line numbers, highlighting and an expiring link for whoever is on call with you.

Related status codes

• 404Not Found: The server found no resource at that URL.
• 301Moved Permanently: The resource has a new permanent URL; clients and search engines should update.

FAQ