How to deal with missing items the SEO way?

Question

I am working on a public-facing web site which serves up articles for people to read. After some time, articles become stale and we remove them from the site. My question is this: what is the best way to handle the situation when a search engine visits a URL corresponding to a removed article? Should the app respond with a permanent redirect (301 Moved Permanently) to a "article not found" page, or is there a better way to handle this?

Edit
These articles are actually not removed, but they are "unpublished" - and they may return to the "published" state eventually.

Answer 1

Well, if you want to be all proper about it, it should redirect not to an article not found, but to an "article removed" page. Because article not found suggests that it should be a 404.

Answer 2

My gut tells me that you should probably have an article removed page, but in practice many sites will simply do a 301 redirect to the home page.

I think the idea there is that any "link juice" from the old article will then be transferred to the home page rather than a generic "article removed" page. I get the feeling though that search engines might not look too kindly on that practice.

Answer 3

If the article is remove you should respond with 410 Gone. Your error page can still have some useful info on it as long as the response code is correct. This indicates that the page has been intentionally removed and is not just "not found" (as would happen with a bad url).

Answer 4

You might consider keeping the content up, with some sort of indicator to the person reading it that the content is stale. Then you could also include more relevant content on the page or links to more relevant content.

This might not be appropriate for your situation, or could be more work than its worth, but it may be a good way not to waste potential traffic.

I feel like the 410 Gone response would be the appropriate response, however, you'd basically be telling the search engine "we don't have this content anymore, so stop linking here" - which isn't advantageous to your SEO strategy.