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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T22:40:29+00:00

I’ve got a page that checks if a user is logged in or the

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I’ve got a page that checks if a user is logged in or the file is public then pushes a PDF to the browser via Response.WriteFile.

Works great except when Google indexes a file and then we remove the file. So I’m looking at adding a 410 Gone to the Response.Status and then redirecting to our error.aspx page.

Firebug tells me that it gets a “302 Found” status code on the document page when a file is deleted. I’m expecting a 410.

Redirect code is:

Response.Status = "410 Gone";
Response.AddHeader("Location", Request.Url.ToString());
Response.Redirect("error.aspx");

Could someone please tell me what I’m getting wrong please?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Redirection is done by sending a status that indicates that the resource is available somewhere else, such as 301 Moved Permanently or 302 Found. You can’t send two status codes in the same response. Either the requested resource does not exist (so you send 410) or it does exist at some other location (so you send 301 or 302 or whatever).

    I don’t think you should be redirecting to an error page, though, because an error message isn’t a separate resource that should have its own URL. If a client requests a file and the file is gone, send a 410 Gone status with the error message as the response body — that way the error message comes back from the URL of the nonexistent file itself. A search engine will see the status code and understand that the file is gone, and a browser will show the response body to the user so he can read the error message.

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