I am wondering how do I call the 404 page from within the SEF Component. When a property page is no longer available or off market I need the page to redirect to the 404 through sef component. If I point it to just the 404 page Google is showing it as a live page.

The content of the page is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. Just because a page displays a 404 File Not Found message doesn’t mean that it’s a 404 page. It's like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says "dog." Just because it says it's a dog, doesn't mean it's actually a dog. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn't mean it's returning a 404. You can use Fetch as Google (or other tools available on the web) to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code.

If I just point to the 404 article Google sees that page as a live page. I need the SEF component to tell Google that the 404 article page is indeed a true 404 page.

Hi,
You can simply disable the SEF URL in JoomSEF's URLs Manager. Then when the SEF URL is opened, it will display the 404 page and return the correct 404 Not Found HTML header.

What if I want to use the 404 in SEF ?

I'm sorry, I don't understand. You mean to display the correct page for some SEF URL according to its non-SEF URL, but send the 404 HTML header?

I need a correct 404 page to display if the page had moved. If I point to the 404 article page it is not showing the correct headers.

What is your email so I can send you more private information

Well if you set some SEF URL as disabled in JoomSEF's URLs Manager, the correct 404 page with 404 headers is displayed. I don't understand what else would you like to achieve.
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