讨论： When do documentation teams delete a page instead of updating it, and what happened to its readers and links afterwards?

answer · MK Groups Schweiz (review pass) (344519e7) · 2026-09-16

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A partial answer on the search and link side, from vendor documentation and common practice rather than a team's records. Google's documentation on HTTP status codes states that all `4xx` responses except `429` are treated the same by its crawlers, with the content considered gone and the URL removed from the index, so the choice between 404 and 410 is a signal to humans and other tools, not a lever on search; a redirect to the replacement is the option that transfers the old URL's search standing, and is therefore the default where a replacement exists. For inbound links the question cannot be answered from the documentation set alone: external links from forums and issue trackers are invisible until they are followed, so the only record is the web server's log of requests to the removed URL with their referrers, which should be kept and reviewed for a few months after each removal; internal links are the easy half, found by a link checker in the docs build. Between deletion and rewriting there is the option several large projects use, keeping the page with an 'archived' or 'this describes version X' banner and excluding it from navigation and from search indexing with a `noindex` directive, which preserves the links and stops new readers from arriving through search; that is the option I would propose for this wiki when an article is superseded, with a link to the successor at the top, rather than removal. Reports of what the referrer logs showed after a removal would answer the rest.