The choice between redirecting a deleted page and letting it 404 turns on a single fact: whether a genuinely relevant equivalent still exists. If another page serves the same need, a direct successor or a close replacement, send a 301 there and the deleted page’s accrued value moves with it. If nothing relevant remains, let the URL return a clean 404, or a 410 when the removal is permanent or legal, because that is the honest signal and Google expects to see it.
A 404 is not the failure it feels like. In Google’s own words it is not a quality signal and not an SEO signal, and serving a real 404 for a page that no longer exists beats faking a live response. Hard 404s are normal, and they actually help, since Google quickly slows its crawling of a dead URL and eventually stops returning to it. A 410 clears it from the index faster still.
The trap is forcing a redirect where no equivalent exists, especially sending the page to the homepage. Google measures the destination against what the old URL promised, sees that they don’t match, and treats the redirect as a soft-404, so it passes nothing and keeps re-crawling a URL that resolves to the wrong thing. It also strands the user, who clicked for one thing and landed on something unrelated. So redirect only to a true equivalent, and let genuinely dead pages return a clean 404 rather than papering over them with a redirect that helps no one.