Pruning 12,400 soft-404s lifted re-crawl rate 2.3x

Pruning 12,400 soft-404s lifted re-crawl rate 2.3x

Classifieds site, expired listings returned 200 with a thin 'no longer available' shell.

Soft-404 share of index ▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░ 58.0% (12,400 / 21,380)

We set expired listings to 410, dropped them from sitemaps, kept a 301 only where a clear successor existed (8.1% of cases).

Measured over the next 28-day crawl window:
— Valuable-URL re-crawl rate: 0.31/day → 0.71/day (↑2.3x)
— Soft-404 in coverage report: 58.0% → 4.2%
— Median position of surviving listings: 14.6 → 11.2 (↓3.4)

So what: 410 is a cleaner signal than 404 for 'gone on purpose.' The crawler stopped re-checking dead inventory and spent that budget on live stock.