Can I stop this happening?

Gogglebot seems to be spending a lot of time following links to attachments to which it shouldn't have access (guest can't view attachments on my forum). Clicking on the link currently being viewed by the bot takes me to the custom 404 page.

Can I prevent the bot from wasting its time like this? Why is it looking at them anyway?

here's an example of what the bot appears to be looking at when viewed on who's online:

UNKNOWN LOCATION http://www.hj-research.com/forum/att...71_-small-.jpg

Thanks

You can add a rule to your robots.txt file.

Disallow: /forum/attachments/

Ah, I guess I must have been having a bad 'cut and paste' day when I amended robots.txt a couple of days ago

Amended. Thank you

Glad it works for ya!