If a users follows a dead link to my site and requests a record which is no longer valid I would like to be able to provide them with a list of other potential records which they might have been searching for. Most of my records get “soft” deleted so I am normally able to derive search data from the ID in the request – but never the new ID of the record (records can be moved but there is no link between the old a new records, other records may simply not exist any more).
My gut instinct is to return a page of content with the possible records along with a 404 header to hopefully get search engines to drop the index for that URL.
The other option would be to redirect (301 – or even 303??) to this results page.
I’d advocate a status code of
300to indicate multiple choices (per RFC)