Should We 410 All URLs or Preserve a Few with 301?

Google Penalized Our German Subdomain

[guarriman3]

We manage a fairly large website focused on insect taxonomy and content. It has:
- 100,000 URLs in English, hosted under example.com
- 100,000 URLs in German, hosted under de.example.com

The German and English versions are content duplicates (same slugs, same structure — only the language changes).

Since mid-2023, Google began heavily deindexing the German version (de.example.com). Today, this subdomain brings in only about 2% of total organic traffic. Clearly, something went wrong — maybe duplicate content issues, thin content signals, or some kind of domain-level penalty.

So my partner and I have decided to retire the German version completely and focus all our efforts on the English one (example.com), which continues to perform well.

We’re now planning how to technically remove de.example.com, and we’re torn between two options:

Option 1
👉 Return 410 Gone for every single URL on de.example.com — 100% of them.
This is the cleanest cut: tell Google it's over, purge it fast, and move on.

Option 2
👉 Return 410 Gone for 99,900 URLs, but set 301 redirects for ~100 German URLs that have backlinks from high-authority domains (e.g., main German newspapers, universities, etc.).
These would redirect to their English equivalents on example.com.

We’re leaning toward Option 2, to preserve the link equity from those valuable backlinks. But we’d love to hear feedback from the community.

🔹 Has anyone gone through a similar domain/subdomain deprecation?
🔹 Would Google still honor the 301s from an obviously deindexed or penalized subdomain?
🔹 Is there any real risk in mixing 301s and 410s during a cleanup like this?

Thanks in advance for your input — we want to do this the right way, avoid future headaches, and salvage what value we can.

[not2easy]

Google has no choice but to follow your 301, but if they find different content on the landing page for that 301, then it is considered a soft 404 which they really don't like. Have you checked the implementation of the German language section? Localized versions of a page are only considered duplicates if the main content of the page is not translated.

They detail how to implement the different localized versions of your site here: [developers.google.com...] if you want to check that everything is done correctly. If the old page is 410 (gone) you should not 301 its content to another page or it is seen as a soft 404.

[guarriman3]

Hi @not2easy, thank you for your answer.

We list 100,000 URLs of insects under 'example.com/label-of-the-insect', with contents obtained from a database (name of the insect, population, region with a map, etc.).

Today, the contents of 'de.example.com/whatever' are exactly the same ones as 'example.com/whatever' but translated into German. We translated the word "name", the word "population" and "individuals", the sentence "you can find this insect in this area", etc. The appearance, design, structure is the same.

And today, we are following the guidelines you provided about how to tell Google about localized versions (HTML tags, sitemaps, region codes, etc.)

Our plan is: did 'de.example.com/whatever' receive backlinks from high-authority domains?
- No: 410
- Yes: 301-redirect 'de.example.com/whatever' --> 'example.com/whatever' (will these redirections be seen as a soft 404?)

Additionally, we will remove all the HTML tags, Hreflang and sitemaps that are currently referencing to the German version.

[not2easy]

If the actual pages will be gone a 410 is appropriate. Using a 301 to redirect to a different page in another language is a soft 404. To keep hard-earned backlinks viable, you might want a page created to highlight the recommendations, but not a 301 from the old page.

[guarriman3]

Thank you again. Not sure about how to design that page to highlight the recommendations.

May it be a single webpage (under the English domain "example.com") to detail all the backlinks received to the removed German version?

[not2easy]

You have endorsements from users, no reason not to share them. It would be nice to add new endorsements, you could set up a form for others to comment, but that would bring in all kinds of spam too so you might be better off without the added work. I'd assume you have some kind of contact set up, so you might consider a space on that new page for others to submit their comments. (?)

20 years ago it was common to have a links page, but Google frowns on that today so you might want a page where you could share those with links and some without, under a common interest page. The links would remain on the site and be crawled at least.

[guarriman3]

Thank you. The website (not only the German version) has been mentioned by important newspapers and also by 700+ academic papers, according to Google Scholar.

Using your nice recommendations, I'm planning to create a specific webpage:
- title: "What they say about us in the media." (avoiding "websites that link to us" or to resemble a "link farm", like 20 years ago)
- around 30 mentions, with dates and snippets of the mentions, and anchor texts like "see article"
- a link to our contact page to invite readers to share their comments

[not2easy]

That sounds like a good way to hang on to the valuable content.