Question about Google Index

Hey guys, I have a quick question about the Google Index. My site www.relevantreviews.net used to be a forum. Now I have built a main page, and I moved the forums to www.relevantreviews.net/forums. When I search site:www.relevantreviews.net into Google, I see all of my forum topics, which all lead to 404 error pages. Does anyone know how I can get my forum and main page back in the Google Index? I have a lot of backlinks, if anyone is wondering.

 

you need to redirect all those pages to the new one. you can search the forum for 301 redirect.

 

And make sure you have a link off your home page to the forum

 

So is it mandatory that I do a 301 redirect? Whenever I try it, it doesn't work. I place the .htaccess file in my cache folder in my forum directory, with this code added on:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.relevantreviews.net/forums/$1 [R=301,L]

But it still doesn't work. Do you guys know what I am doing wrong?

 

Excuse the double post. So I just called Google, and the robot said that if the site information changes, the site indexed will change within 4-6 weeks. Does this mean that those invalid pages will be deleted, and replaced by the new ones on the forum and main page?