301 redirect or 410 when I kill a page?

301 redirect or 410 when I kill a page?
Q: Retiring some old articles. Redirect them or just let them die?

A: Short answer: 301 if there's a close replacement, 410 if there genuinely isn't.

Longer answer: a 301 passes the page's accumulated relevance to the target — but only if the target is actually about the same thing. Redirecting a dead 'best blender 2019' post to your homepage is a soft signal to Google that you're faking relevance, and it often gets treated as a soft 404 anyway. No honest match? Return 410 (Gone). It tells crawlers 'this is intentionally removed,' drops it from the index faster than a 404, and stops wasting crawl budget revisiting a ghost.

Lazy homepage redirects are the mistake I see most.

Anyone want me to go deeper on this? React 👍