roddy - 5:59 am on Nov 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

I started a forum a few months ago, and Googlebot's always loved it, especially since we went to PR6. At first I just let it run around as it wanted - I wasn't anywhere close to using up my bandwidth as it was, and I didn't want to scare it off by messing up my robots.txt.

However, last month it took about half a gig of bandwidth, and so far this month it's on course for almost twice that.

I put a robots.txt in place about a week ago. I checked it carefully, validated it, and waited. No joy. It's still taking posting, log-on and search pages I've tried to disallow. I checked on Google's help pages, and they seem to say that the robots.txt should get read every 24 hours - so it should have kicked in by now.

Any ideas? Anyway I can force the Googlebot to read my robots.txt?

This is what I'm using. I want to restrict all bots to only reading index, forum and topic pages so I disallowed everything else.

User-agent: *
Disallow: privmsg.php
Disallow: search.php
Disallow: faq.php
Disallow: memberlist.php
Disallow: groupcp.php
Disallow: profile.php
Disallow: login.php
Disallow: posting.php
Disallow: viewonline.php

Roddy