spiders keep crawling for nofile.php and getting a 404

but there is no nofile.php

[master w bates III]

This is an odd error here. Going through my sites logs I am getting a ton of 404's (in the thousands each month) for a file called nofile.php

There obviously is no nofile.php file on my server, yet there are no links or includes for nofile.php anywhere in my code.

What is this mysterious nofile.php and why do search engine spiders keep looking for it?

What is the best way for me to deal with this problem?

Thanks for the help in advance guys!

[The Contractor]

redirect nofile.php to your homepage ;)

[master w bates III]

1st thing that i did :)

do you have any idea why they were looking for that file with no other reference to it?

[Philosopher]

likely there is a link pointing to it somewhere (or was at one time) ...not necessarily on your site.