In this short note, we use a unified method to consider the gradient estimates of the positive solution to the following nonlinear elliptic equation $Delta u + au^{p+1}=0$ defined on a complete noncompact Riemannian manifold $(M, g)$ where $a > 0$ and $ p <frac{4}{n}$ or $a < 0$ and $p >0$ are two constants. For the case $a>0$, this improves considerably the previous known results except for the cases $dim(M)=4$ and supplements the results for the case $dim(M)leq 2$. For the case $a<0$ and $p>0$, we also improve considerably the previous related results. When the Ricci curvature of $(M,g)$ is nonnegative, we also obtain a Liouville-type theorem for the above equation.