In other words, you seem to be inquiring about Google’s present-day response to HTTP Status Codes, especially in regard to 404 and 410. But before getting into the veins of Google, it might be a better idea to get to know what HTTP status codes actually are. Well, please read on to quench your thirst for Hypertext Transfer Protocol response status codes that are returned whenever search engines or visitors (website visitors) make a request to a web server.Incidentally, these are three-digit codes that indicate the status of HTTP requests. Although there are very many different HTTP status codes, not all are so significant for SEO purposes. However, here is a list of HTTP status codes that are considered important for SEO and search engines.

•  200                   : OK

• 301                   : Moved for good

• 302                   : The server is responding to the request with a page from different location. This  approach is not fully lauded nor is it an effective way to instruct search engine bots that a page or a website has temporarily moved.

• 404                   : Page not found, suggesting that the server has not been able to locate anything matching the request-URL. Also, there is no indication of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

• 410                   : Gone forever. Additionally, the request resource is not available at the server, while there is no forwarding address available, too. Also, the condition is deemed to be a permanent one.

How Google is Currently Treating 404 & 410 Status Codes

To be very precise, Google is currently treating 404 (Page not found) and 410 (Gone forever) a bit differently from the way this search engine giant used to treat them earlier. In fact, Google is now treating 410 as “more permanent” than the 404. Even though it may seem to be a very minor change, yet it has far-reaching effect on webmasters the world over. However, let us hearwhat some of Google’s high hats have to say in this context.

Excerpt From the Text Provided by John Mueller (JohnMu) of Google on 404 & 410

“I followed up on the 404 vs. 410 things with the Google Webmaster team here. As mentioned by some others here and elsewhere, we have been treating them the same in the past. However, after looking at how webmasters use them in practice, we are now treating the 410 HTTP result code as a bit ‘more permanent’ than a 404. So, if you are absolutely sure that a page no longer exists and will never exist again, using a 410 would likely be a good thing. I don’t think it’s worth rewriting a server to change from 404 to 410, but if you are looking at that part of your code anyway, you might as well choose the ‘permanent’ result code if you can be absolutely sure that the URL will not be used again. If you can’t be sure of that (for whatever reason), then I would recommend sticking to the 404 HTTP result code.

Now, Let us see what Google’s Matt Cutts Has to Say on The Same Topic

Matt says Google does treat 404′s and 410′s a little differently, but for the most part you shouldn’t worry about it.Matt also goes on to explain how these types of status codes are treated when crawled by Googlebot. If Google crawls a page and sees a 404, they protect the page for 24 hours in the crawling system in case the 404 was unintentional.

If Google crawls a page and sees a 410, it’s assumed that status code is intentional because a webmaster would have had to manually go in and input the 410 code to indicate the page is gone. Rather than protecting a page with a 410, it’s treated as an error.Matt says Google still may go back the page is truly gone, but for the most part if you know the page is gone and not coming back it’s ok to serve a 410. If a page is gone, but may be coming back, it’s ok to serve a 404.Those are the basic differences, and Matt emphasizes a second time not to worry about them too much.