A 404 (Not Found) status code is what a website usually returns when a page or resource can’t be located. It’s a fairly standard setup when you’re configuring a site and deciding what to tell both search engines and visitors after you’ve taken down pages or content.
Google Search Console flags 404s in the page indexing section, under the “not indexed” tab. As mentioned above, a 404 typically shows up there because a page that was previously indexed has been removed, or because the site still has internal links pointing to it, including links in your sitemap. Those links need updating, and the sitemap should be resubmitted once you’ve deleted the content. In an ideal world the sitemap would update automatically, but from experience working with some sportsbooks and casinos, that isn’t always how things are set up.
From an SEO point of view, broken internal links are something you’ll want to fix quickly. They hurt the user experience and drag down your SEO at the same time.
You can also trigger 404 responses by adding an internal link from another page with the wrong URL. Keep an eye out for these and correct them whenever they slip through.
Here’s the thing about search engines: they’ll keep coming back to pages that were once indexed. So even when a page returns a 404, the bots can revisit it repeatedly to check whether the content has reappeared.
Put this in the context of iGaming SEO, and the pattern becomes clear. With sportsbooks, and depending on your platform provider, you’ll often see 404s crop up as markets close and pages get removed. Take an event like Cheltenham. In the build-up, the pages are live and ready to accept bets on active markets. Once the racing wraps up, they’re taken down, and that frequently leaves you with a 404.
The problem here, from an SEO standpoint, is that the Cheltenham page really ought to be a static, optimised URL that stays live all year round. That way it builds up history and trust over time, rather than being a brand new page added every season. When you spin up a fresh page each year, you’re essentially resetting all the SEO work for that event and starting from scratch. That might not matter much for the likes of PaddyPower or Bet365, but if you’re a smaller operator, it’s worth thinking hard about your strategy and how you plan to compete for these big events against bigger names in the search results.
On the casino side, 404s tend to appear as slot content or game providers get pulled, something that happens fairly often thanks to commercial and licensing factors that vary by GEO. A slot might be ruled non-compliant in the UK, for example, which means the page has to come down.
Broadly speaking, what we want in SEO is a clean crawl experience for the search engines. Google will tell you not to lose sleep over 404s, since they’re a natural part of how content shifts around on the web. The catch is that 404s can sit in the index for months on end, and leaving those pages hanging around for that long is something you’ll want to deal with.
What are 410 response codes?
A 410 (Gone) response works differently. Instead of saying the page couldn’t be found, it tells search engines the page or resource no longer exists at all. In other words, it’s a far more permanent signal. A 410 is a deliberate instruction rather than the by-product of a broken link or some error that caused a page to disappear.
Just as importantly, it cuts down how often search engines come back to crawl those pages, which helps tidy up your index. So if you’re removing a page or piece of content for good and there’s no need to redirect users to something similar, a 410 is the better call. It tells search engines to de-index the page.
How can this benefit your website?
Choosing 410s over 404s reduces the number of pages that search engine spiders crawl for no reason. They stop visiting dead ends and stop checking to see whether a page has come back. The upshot is that dead pages fall out of the index much faster, so you’re not burning through crawl budget pointlessly. On top of that, these 410 pages get crawled far less often.
We looked at the results of several investigations into this. The tests analysed log files and found that, compared with 404s, there’s up to a 50% drop in visits from search engine spiders. If you line that up against redirects, it almost suggests that 404s behave like 302 (Temporary) redirects, while 410s behave like 301 (Permanent) ones.
Summary
To wrap things up, 404s still have their place, but 410s are the smarter option when you’re permanently removing pages from a site. Along with the bonus of keeping those unwanted pages away from web crawlers, this helps lift your site’s performance and overall optimisation, all while cutting down the number of broken links being detected. If you’re running into trouble marketing your casino, get in touch with us at the iGaming Agency and we’ll be glad to help.
