Hello,
Thank you for your query, and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.
It seems that you’re currently using the Rank Math PRO plugin, but the account you have used to open this ticket is the Rank Math free version.
Can you please search and forward a receipt from FastSpring.com so we can locate your account and verify it?
Regarding your question, when you delete content from your website and a user tries to access it, it results in an error.
Usually, a 404 error is thrown to tell the user that the page they are trying to access does not exist.
However, there is another way of doing the same thing.
If you’d like to convey to the search engines that the content has been deleted, you can serve a 410 HTTP status on the page.
This lets the search engines know that the content on this page used to exist, but it has been deleted.
Currently, any deleted pages are handled by Rank Math as 404 errors, and they will show up in the 404 Monitor.
If you have already marked them as 410s, you can safely ignore these errors. In a future update, we will make some changes to Rank Math that will help distinguish these errors better.
410 Content Deleted should be used when you’re sure that you want to delete a particular page completely.
If a URL returns a 410, Google knows for sure you removed the URL on purpose, and it should remove that URL from its index the earliest and stop crawling the page further.
Rank Math supports 410 Content Deleted maintenance code that you can use when the content in question has been deleted, and no suitable replacement is available.
Refer to the following pages for beter understanding :
1. Types of Redirects – Which Redirect Should You Use? : https://rankmath.com/kb/redirect-types/
2. Solving Redirection Issues Using Rank Math SEO : https://rankmath.com/kb/solving-redirection-issues-using-rank-math-seo/
There’s usually not much else you need to do once you’ve set up the redirect properly.
However for future redirection setups, you can use a 301 redirect in most cases.
When you set up a 301 redirect, Google will interpret this as a permanent move, and it will transfer the ranking power from the old page to the new one.
This process may take some time, but eventually, Google should update its index to reflect the new location of your content.
We hope that helps, and please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
Thank you.
