404 for Deleted Threads

For consideration:

If this's public and the content no longer exists, it's a better signal to send to search engines scraping the site that it is indeed a 404 since it was deleted. It can be confusing to search engines and say tools such as "ahrefs" that check backlinks, for it to return a '200' when the link no longer represents the original content. It sounds like you need a 404 error that allows you to say that the thread no longer exists instead (which I thought was the default?).

This is a great point. We are operating under the assumption that 404's are bad for SEO. Our message for these threads have been updated and make sense in the user flow. 

Stephen Vicino said:

This is a great point. We are operating under the assumption that 404's are bad for SEO.

Google's official stance should help!

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site

Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site's ranking?
A: 404 errors are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a soft 404). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL—if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won't be able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist or return 404 errors does not affect how your site's other URLs (the ones that return 200 (Success) status codes) perform in our search results.

- In particular:

Q: Tell me more about "soft 404 errors."
A: A soft 404 is when a web server returns a response code other than 404 (or 410) for a URL that doesn't exist. A common example is when a site owner wants to return a pretty 404 page with helpful information for their users, and thinks that in order to serve content to users, they have to return a 200 response code. Not so! You can return a 404 response code while serving whatever content you want.

Stephen Vicino said:

This is a great point. We are operating under the assumption that 404's are bad for SEO.

Google's official stance should help!

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site

Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site's ranking?
A: 404 errors are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a soft 404). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL—if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won't be able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist or return 404 errors does not affect how your site's other URLs (the ones that return 200 (Success) status codes) perform in our search results.

- In particular:

Q: Tell me more about "soft 404 errors."
A: A soft 404 is when a web server returns a response code other than 404 (or 410) for a URL that doesn't exist. A common example is when a site owner wants to return a pretty 404 page with helpful information for their users, and thinks that in order to serve content to users, they have to return a 200 response code. Not so! You can return a 404 response code while serving whatever content you want.