Should I redirect a page I deleted, or let it return an error?

Is there a page a visitor who wanted the old one would be glad to land on?

A discontinued product replaced by a successor: yes, redirect to the successor.

Two articles merged into one: yes, redirect both to the merged version.

A section moved to new addresses: yes, redirect each old URL to its own new one.

An event that happened, an offer that ended, a page removed on purpose: usually no — and a redirect then sends people somewhere they did not ask to go.

A visitor who followed a link to a specific page and lands on the home page has to start again, which is worse than an honest error page that offers navigation.

Search engines recognise mass redirects to the home page and generally treat them as soft 404s, so the redirect does not carry anything the error would not.

It also hides the problem: the old URLs never appear as errors in any report, so nobody fixes the links pointing at them.

The same applies to redirecting to a category page that does not contain what was asked for.

Both tell clients the page is not there, and both lead search engines to drop it from the index.

410 says the removal is deliberate and permanent; 404 says only that nothing is at this address now.

In practice search engines may act on a 410 slightly faster, and the difference rarely matters much.

410 is worth the effort for a large, deliberate removal — a retired product line, a purged section — where you want the signal to be unambiguous.

For an occasional deleted page, a correct 404 is entirely adequate.

External links pointing at the deleted page: these are the strongest reason to redirect when an equivalent exists, since they keep sending visitors.

Traffic the page still receives, which the server or CDN logs show.

Internal links: whatever you decide, fix the links on your own site so they point at the new destination or are removed.

The sitemap: remove the deleted URL from it, since listing a page that redirects or returns an error is a contradiction.

A page with no links and no traffic can simply return 404 without further thought.

A redirect that leads to another redirect, which adds a hop for every visitor and eventually becomes a chain.

A redirect to a page that itself returns an error, which is worse than the original 404.

An error page that returns 200, which tells search engines the missing page exists and has this content.

A temporary redirect used for a permanent removal, which leaves the old URL indexed longer than necessary.

Deleting and redirecting pages in bulk without recording the mapping, which makes the next migration harder.