I am wondering about the standard handling of deleted data links from an application and an SEO perspective. I have an application where users can create content but they can also delete content.  What is the best way to handle incoming traffic to links that have since been deleted?Should I redirect them somewhere with a 301 or should I throw a different error and just leave the page in tact with an error message?
What should happen when content is deleted?
seo;http headers
If the page is not replaced by new content Send a 410 GONE HTTP status message which tells search engines that the page doesn't exist anymore. Have the page's content tell the user why the page is gone and give them options for finding existing content on your website. This should links to your home page, site map (if one exists), search page (if one exists), and links to similar content (if such content exists).