404 vs 410 SEO Experiment shows the 404 URLs were crawled more often by Googlebot
https://www.rebootonline.comThe hypothesis was that deleted URLs that returned a 410 response code would be recrawled less frequently and removed from Google’s index quicker than deleted URLs returning a 404 response code.
When the experiment was done, they found that Google was crawling the 404 URLs more than they were crawling the 410 ones. Which I don’t think would have surprised most folks.