Question

I need to disallow http://example.com/startup?page=2 search pages from being indexed.

I want http://example.com/startup to be indexed but not http://example.com/startup?page=2 and page3 and so on.

Also, startup can be random, e.g., http://example.com/XXXXX?page

Answer 1

Something like this works, as confirmed by Google Webmaster Tools “test robots.txt” function:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /startup?page=

Disallow The value of this field
specifies a partial URL that is not to
be visited. This can be a full path,
or a partial path; any URL that starts
with this value will not be retrieved.

However, if the first part of the URL will change, you must use wildcards:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /startup?page=
Disallow: *page=
Disallow: *?page=