Kogan.com mysteriously disappears from Microsoft Search Engines Posted: 09 Jul 2012

As you probably know, we recently implemented an IE7 tax to encourage people to upgrade their web browsers. As fellow Internet citizens, we were just trying to do our bit to make the web a better place for all. The response was tremendous and we received support for the cause from hundreds of thousands of fellow technology connoisseurs. It made international news on News.com.au, the BBC, TechCrunch, Mashable, and was even the #1 most discussed topic around the world on Twitter the day it was announced. Most importantly, it made more people aware of the huge cost to the Internet economy that IE7 is causing.

Shortly after the IE7 tax was released, we noticed that the www.kogan.com website stopped appearing in organic search results on Microsoft backed search engines, such as bing.com and yahoo.com.

A search for 'kogan.com' in the Bing search engine no longer shows the Kogan.com website.

A search for 'kogan.com' in the Yahoo search engine no longer shows the Kogan.com website.

As you can see from the above, the www.kogan.com website, which is the one with the IE7 Tax, is omitted from the search results. The search shows the Kogan Wikipedia entries and our Facebook and Twitter presence, but not our actual website. Even some of our international operations and old website come up in the search results but not our actual website, which has the highest traffic and is our global online HQ.

This is very strange considering we are big Microsoft fans. We love what Microsoft have contributed to the personal computing space over several decades. We never waged war against Microsoft over IE7, we simply wanted people to upgrade their web browsers – we even mentioned many times in the media how the latest versions of Internet Explorer comply with the latest web standards and are suitable browsers.

We were baffled and shocked to learn that in the aftermath of introducing the IE7 tax, our website stopped appearing in search results in Bing, Yahoo and other search engines in the Microsoft Network.

Here you can see the search results in Google, which prides itself on an objective search algorithm:

Googling 'kogan.com' clearly shows the kogan.com website as the first result.

We hope Microsoft were not too offended by what we did with the IE7 tax and this is just a temporary glitch.

Do you think this is just a glitch from Microsoft, or is there something more at play here?