pageoneresults - 5:38 pm on Sep 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

A friend just advised to do a 301 to the job result pages of the category where the job was posted (that means 301 to some sort of similar content I guess).

That would work if the content at the upper level category was relevant to what the user is looking for. If there are a number of job titles in one category and one goes inactive, I see no problem with 301'ing that user back to the upper level and letting the user see other opportunities under that job title.

Would that be better than the 410 in your views?

Again, it will all depend on where you put the user. Can you still put them one click away from where they need to be? If so, I'd probably suggest the 301 method.

Here, you have a user already who doesn't mind being redirected back to an upper level...

At least, if I was searching for a job in a specific area then i'd be happy if other options were also provided. But that's from a user-perspective, not from a SEO.

The problem with the 301 redirect is that it doesn't tell the 'bot that the page is gone, nor the user that the job is gone; both can get confused.

I would think this is open for interpretation. In this case, a 301 is telling the bot that the page is gone and to permanently redirect to a page that can fill the void. Personally, I'd rather put the user at a page that is more helpful than a custom 404 or "Page Not Found".

One of my competitors (with pretty impressive ranking) leaves pages with a 200 (OK) and a message along the lines of "it doesn't exist any longer" and obviously a bunch of links around that.

Are you sure its returning a 200? For both bots and humans? If so, that would probably fall in the "stub" category and not be of any benefit from an SEO perspective, or from a user perspective if you don't mind me sharing my opinion. ;)

It sounds to me that the 410 is the most ethic one.

Wait, wait! Let's keep ethics out of this please. We're discussing the correct protocol to utilize when pages no longer exist. Which status you choose to return will be relevant to where the user should end up if the page does not exist.