I have a load of content that is gone (don't ask). I would like to tell Google and other search engines that this resource is gone, please don't try to index it. This is what HTTP status code 410 looks good for.
This is great for search robots, but if it's a real person accessing the page, I'd rather they were redirected to the new content.
Luckily, all the gone URLs match a pattern.
Is it possible to have all those handled by issueing a 410, and a redirect of some sort?
(I worry that permanent redirects might affect SEO too?)
Put another way: what I want to say is "That content is gone, you should not link to it. There's new content here:..."
[EDIT: to express why this is Drupal related]
Drupal is my CMS. With any generic website I would find my own solution to present a page and the correct header. With Drupal there's usually "a module for that", sometimes an elegant way to solve a common problem, and sometimes a hideously inefficient way to square a circle known as "the Drupal Way" [joke].
Drupal has an in-built system for 404s that works great. You can set a page, and because it's got a url you can use the block module to put other useful stuff on it, e.g. a View.
So there's 2 questions:
Does Drupal (or a reliably contrib'ed module) have a way to issue 410s akin to the 404 system?
Does Drupal have a 302/301 redirect system that can work with path patterns (i.e. separate from node as these dead pages were from another module that has been removed)