Google Image indexing

[MonkYZ]

Hello! Can somebody enlighten me with an answer for this: If i will disable "Can Download Attachments" for Unregistered/Not logged in Usergroup, will Google Images be able to process the attached images on my forums? Or it will be blocked and asked to register like every other guest/unregistered user?

The answer is very important for me... I just hope that Google Robots will still be able to get the images.

Btw, inside my robots.txt i have the following lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

[Alfa1]

It will be blocked if you disable guest viewing of attachments. Google Images will not be able to index your images. However, by default google images does not index vbulletin attachments very well.

You should make better use of robots.txt and define which user-agents you want to allow and block and which folders/files you disallow.

[MonkYZ]

Thanks Alfa1, but i actually realised 90% of my bandwith got "stolen" by guests visiting the images indexed by google. So i've decided to block the leachers by disabling acces to download images from guests. If they want to see the attachments, at least i'll see them registered (not that i really want extra users just for that).

But, now the main problem gets in the fact we're gonna lose a lot of hits coming from Google Images... Isn't there any way we could make a special Usergroup for Google, Yahoo & other bots? Or maybe they have some special settings, where we can give them user/password to acces all the website?

Thanks in advance!