404 broken URLs coming up in Google

[Gavo]

When we do a search for our brand, we are get the following results in google.com.au (see image attachment).

As outlined in red, there are listings in Google that result in 404 Page Not Found URLs.

What can we do to enable google to do a recrawl or to ensure that these broken URLs are no longer listed in Google?

Thanks for your help here!

sBqpvtj

[paints-n-design]

You may redirect them 301 to the page wich is now the best answer for the search query. That fixes the problem for the user immediatly.
You can than go to search console and let the bot crawl the url again (fetch as google) - he will see the redirect, you can send it to google.
Make sure your redirection is the best answer.

[MikeRoberts]

Agreed. Go to Search Console, see what 404 errors Google is throwing your way, 301 redirect anything that can & should be redirected from the list to their most relevant equivalent on the live site, and then fetch & submit the site for a recrawl.

OR (since the links in question you posted was for a Test Site) if that test version needs to be up for internal testing purposes then you can potentially NoIndex the pages, resubmit for crawl so the bots see the NoIndex on the pages, and then after they've dropped out of the SERPs you can update your robots.txt to disallow the folder those pages are sitting on. (Not sure if there's a better/quicker way to get them out of the SERPs if you still need it Live)

[Gavo]

Apologies for the delay in responses here. Thanks Andreas and Mike. We ended up doing just that and redirected 404 errors before doing a recrawl. Worked great! Thanks for your help.