B.2 Consolidation and redirect map: 357 rows

Why the kills return 410, not 301. A 301 to the homepage feels like the safe call, but Google reads a redirected dead page as a soft 404: the homepage is not what the searcher asked for, so the redirect gets flagged and the dead URL can linger in the index for months with a stale snippet attached. Users bounce the same way: they click expecting a specific page, land on the homepage with no explanation, and leave. A 410 is the clean signal: this page is gone for good, so remove it now. Google strips 410s from the index faster than 301s or 404s, crawl budget stays on pages that exist, and a custom 410 page can still tell the visitor the page is retired and point them at the nearest hub. That is why the 180 kill rows return 410.