Let's imagine this simplified case:An auction website has auction detail pages.A few weeks after the auction is over, the auction detail page is no more available.We are simply serving a HTTP/1.1 410 Gone with the page providing the reason.However our competitors play differently (even ebay)...When the content is deleted they serve a HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently and redirect to the category list related to the auction.What is the cleanness of this 301 redirect strategy? (to us it looks more like grey/black seo)What is the best strategy?Please note:Once the user deletes his auction, we cannot leave the content accessible (even by direct link) as some data are strategic or senstive.
How should an expired content be handled?
seo;301 redirect;http headers;expires;410 gone
Google considers redirecting content that is no longer available to be soft 404.  They would like to be able to treat the page the same as a 404 page.  If you redirect the expired page to your home page, Google will identify it as a soft 404.  It will appear in Google Webmaster Tools as an error.  Google won't pass the link juice from inbound links to the rest of your site.Right now, Google doesn't appear to be able to identify soft 404s that redirect to a category page.  Many sites use this loophole to redirect their expired content. This may change in the future.  Google could write better soft 404 detection algorithms.Google does ask that you use 410 errors for removed content.  They treat 410 errors specially, removing the page from the search results right away.Regardless of which strategy you use for search engines, users like to get a page:With a message that what they are looking for is no longer availableA list of other options that may meet their needs