Answer 404 or 410 when a page is gone for good

How to do it

Use 410 to say the removal is on purpose, and keep it in the redirect map so nobody adds the address back by mistake. Google treats all 4xx answers except 429 the same way, so 404 is fine too. Show the site's navigation and a way to search or go home.

Example

HTTP/2 410
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8

error_page 404 /404.html;
location / {
  try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
}

How to check

Request a removed address and a made-up one, such as curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' https://example.com/no-such-page. Each answers 404 or 410, never 200 and never a redirect to the home page.