Permalinks set to /%postname%/ but still have links being indexed in the form ?p=x

Question

I have a site that has pages being indexed in Google in the form...

site.com/?p=1
site.com/?category_name=uncategorized
site.com/?author=1
site.com/?m=201103

And since the permalinks of the site have been set to postname since the site was created, I'm trying to determine how these links are being created and where I might be able to find the source file that created the link index.

I realize its possible that the site was indexed prior to the permalink update, but just trying to determine if there is a script I'm not aware of that might be accessible to a search engine spider.

Any insights?

Answer 1

There are two places bots would look: your sitemap (if you submitted one to google), and your robots.txt. WordPress itself doesn't put anything in robots.txt (unless you set your site to private, then it tells the bots not to index anything), nor does it create xml sitemaps that google would use.

There are a few plugins that will do this for you, though. I know Google XML Sitemaps is popular, and works for me. Yoast's SEO plugin also creates sitemaps for you.

I think the easiest way to get Google to start indexing correctly is to create a sitemap with one of those two plugins and then submit it to google using google webmaster tools.

Answer 2

If your site was previously indexed with those URLs, then they will remain until Google's spider gets around to recrawling your site. Then it will notice the redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, and correct itself accordingly.

This is not a fast process. May take months.