How many 404 errors do you get a day? How many are from things you've done?
One thing for sure, search engines log all the 404's they get when following links from other sites. The other day I had @ 3800 pages not found recorded at GWT's. When I went to check them out there were some from 2 years ago and a bunch from pages I'd removed.
I want to remove pages whenever I feel like it and deliver a 410 saying "I removed this page". Maybe say why and include a link to the site search. But I don't want a gone showing up as not found.
There are a lot of tools we can use to check for broken links. Once all the links are working you can simply write this into htaccess: ErrorDocument 404 /error/410.shtml
We can comment it out or change it to ErrorDocument 404 /error/404.shtml whenever we want to. We still need to keep track of changing external links and so different directories can be set individually. Something to think about
