A pdf file needs to be "taken down"

[Kanako_Tone2]

I have a .pdf file hosted in File/Image section of Marketo, back from 2012. One of our prospects somehow found this file link by rigorously searching on google, and now my team wants to take it down.

I'm afraid of deleting the file to avoid the negative impact on SEO, while we don't have a replacement file as this pdf is about the product we no longer offer.

I contacted the support and they confirmed that we cannot redirect the file URLs.

Does anyone have any idea if this file link will be marked as 410 Content Deleted or 404 Not Found? The former seems better than the latter from the SEO perspective.

I appreciate your help as always!

[Pavel_Plachky]

You could replace it with a PDF that says "The product you searched for is no longer available". You can easily create such PDF in MS Word and use Save As PDF, then replace the existing PDF with the new one.

I hope it helps.

Pavel

[Gerard_Donnell4]

How did the user find the URL? Directly in google? As long as its not linked to on your website or from a host of other sites I would remove it. Google will remove the link from search results once it does another crawl and realises its not there anymore. Also, if the product does not exist anymore why would you want customers still finding it? Like the comment above you could update the PDF with a newer version and maybe use it to refer to a newer replacement product instead.  Fill in all the meta data for the PDF and then let google begin to organically rank it based on the new content.

[Kanako_Tone2]

They searched on google. I wasn't even aware there's such a doc as it's dated back in 2012. I don't want people to find it, but I'm concerned about ruining SEO ranking and whatsoever just by blindly  deleting it and marking it as 404. According to this article, How to properly delete a page from your site • Yoast, it'd be better to do 410 if I can't redirect.