attachment.php and robots.txt

Do you let google index the attachments? Some people say that you should have attachments.php in the robots.txt file. But you can also get a lot of traffic through google images.

 

Can I get a bump on this and maybe just an "opinion" from someone please?

In my google webmaster tools, it says that over 10,000 urls are restricted by my robots.txt. Those are attachments, and attachment.php is restricted by robots.txt. But guest can not view images anyway.

So maybe let google index attachemnt.php and let guest view images? It might get a lot of my pages indexed by google iamges.

 

Im not sure what is right or wrong. In analytics it says we get some decent traffic from the images site, might be good to unleash the lot

 

Try experimenting with it. Maybe open it up for a month, and watch what happens to it.

 

I never knew Google could crawl attachment images, since the URL is PHP (dynamic) and not an image format.
I have no clue what I'm talking about, but that was my assumption.

Hopefully somebody can clarify. My forum revolves heavily around pictures -- they are an integral part of my site -- so I would be forever grateful if I could figure out how to get my images indexed and appear in Google Images.

 

I'm not sure exactly how Google does it, but they do. I see avatars pop up all the time.

Example from a forum I frequent:
Google Image Result for http://iogaming.net/forums/image.php?u=61&dateline=1221369920

The URL to the image:
http://iogaming.net/forums/image.php?u=61&dateline=1221369920

I'm pretty sure the same thing is done with attachments, and I've probably seen a few on Google Image search results.

EDIT: It can. Doing a search for "forum attachment" brought up a good amount of results. One example:

Result: http://images.google.com/imgres?img...l=en&sa=G&newwindow=1&ei=4BJFSqbfI9-DlAeNiokY

File: http://www.photomalaysia.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=27836&d=1169185812