• 410 Status: Signals a permanent removal, leading to faster deindexing and a quicker “back-off” from the crawler.
• 404 Status: Signals a potential error, causing Googlebot to revisit the URL more frequently to see if it returns.

If you have set up 410 (Gone) status codes on your site, and checked under Google Search Console to see them all reported back as 410s — you might be in for a surprise. GSC groups them all under “Not found (404).

I ran into this myself recently. So we removed all coupon and discount codes section completely from www. theseospot.com — 100s of pages on what stores have deals, promo codes and voucher listings.

Since that content was no longer in line with where we were headed, we removed it all and served appropriate 410 (Gone) responses on each and every URL.

Here’s how you can verify it yourself. Open your CMD or Terminal and run:

curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" https://www.theseospot.com/nakedleaf-com

These are 410 pages from our website!

It prints 410. The page is gone — permanently. I have verified this across multiple URLs from our removed section:

curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" https://www.theseospot.com/vouchercart-com

Again, 410. Every single one of these old store pages — whether it was discount codes for random shops, parking deals, or product coupons — all return a clean 410 Gone response. The content has been permanently removed and will not be coming back.

Yet when I checked Google Search Console? Every one of these URLs was reported as “Not found (404).”

So What’s Actually Happening?

Google Search Console does not separately report 410 status codes. It groups all 4xx client errors — whether it’s a 404, 410, or anything else — under the same “Not found (404)” label. This applies to both the Pages (Indexing) report and the Crawl Stats report.

Why Google Search Console Shows Your 410 Pages as 404 (It’s Not a Bug)

This isn’t a bug. It’s just how GSC works. Google’s own forum support confirms that they’ll not report 410s separately, and multiple SEOs have confirmed this behavior over the years.

If you mean why doesn’t the 410 show in GSC, then they don’t.  They just get returned with the 404s.

Google doesn’t really treat them any differently, hence the lack of separate reporting.  I know a 410 would appear to be a stronger message (and I personally wish it was treated as such), but it’s not.

Does Google Still Treat 410 Differently?

Yes. Even though the reporting looks the same, Google internally treats 410 and 404 differently. A 410 tells Googlebot the page is permanently gone, which typically leads to:

• Faster deindexing compared to a regular 404
• Googlebot backing off and reducing crawl frequency on those URLs sooner
• Quicker cleanup of your crawl budget

In our case, we removed over 3,000 coupon pages from www.theseospot.com and none of that content exists anymore. The 410 status code is our way of telling Google — and anyone else requesting those URLs — that this content is permanently gone with no intention of returning.

Bottom Line

Your 410s are working. Google sees them. GSC just doesn’t label them separately. Don’t panic when you see “Not found (404)” in your reports — verify with curl or any HTTP status checker tool, and move on.

If you’re doing a large-scale content cleanup like we did, trust the 410 response code to do its job. Google will catch up — it just won’t show you the difference in its dashboard.