410 Errors

Hi, I have been reading this forum for awhile so thought i make my first post.

Background
I have a site that receives over 400,000 visits a month and about 5,000,000 page views a month, The site has over 5,000,000 indexed pages.


Problem
I been being doing a lot of SEO work over the last few months. I noticed that Google was flagging up a lot of pages as soft 404 after doing some research it came to light that this wasn't good. So i changed it so when a product/item that was listed on the site before and have since gone from the website i will pass a 410 "Gone". Webmaster tools has found 500,000 410 errors does anyone know if that has an effect on the ranking of the site?

5.000.000 indexed pages and 410 errors. The percentage is too low to cause issues on your website but if you're an over perfectionist try not to delete your product pages anymore and add a "product not available" message.

Also put those pages in an archive folder that isn't linked to your website in any way.

This will mean that googlebots still see this pages and new users don't.

If by any change some users stumble upon those pages you can redirect them with some boxes showing relevant or similar products available on your site.

Problem solved.

A faster fix would be to create a custom 404 page, something like yoursite.com/error and 301 redirect all your deleted pages to that custom error page. You won't have anymore 404's. But remember, after you do this, you'll have to manually mark as fixed all the soft 404's on your GWT.