The CEO of online electronics retailer Kogan has backed away from claims that Bing and Yahoo! deliberately removed his website from their search engines as punishment for criticising Internet Explorer 7.

Kogan announced last month that it would tax people who used IE7 to make a purchase on their website in a bid to get them to upgrade their browsers.

A screenshot of a Bing search for Kogan.

The company then revealed last night that their website had stopped appearing in organic search results on the Microsoft-owned search engines Bing and Yahoo!

"Two days after the IE 7 tax is when we stopped getting traffic at all from Bing and Yahoo!," said CEO Ruslan Kogan in an interview with Fairfax, the publisher of this article.