301 Redirect vs 410 Response Code for Short Life Content

Hi guys,

The site I work on creates hundreds of webpages each and every day. These pages can exist from anywhere from 24 hours to a month, or longer. Once the page expires, the content is deleted, and we serve a 410 response code to crawlers.

The 410 code, or Gone code, "Indicates that the resource requested is no longer available and will not be available again. This should be used when a resource has been intentionally removed and the resource should be purged. Upon receiving a 410 status code, the client should not request the resource again in the future. Clients such as search engines should remove the resource from their indices."

While it's technically true that the pages are gone and will never ever come back, is it a better practice from an SEO point of view to instead 301 redirect the page to its parent for this type of content?

301'ing a page should only be technically done when the page has moved to a new URL. While there is a close relationship between the parent and the child pages; it's not a 1-for-1 match.

But does that really matter? Am I losing SEO value by returning the 410 instead of 301'ing. And if I do 301 the pages, will it help or hinder?