They serve their robots.txt as a "application/octet-stream" not "text/plain". Might be confusing some search engines?

Also according to Internet Archive their robots.txt has changed in the last months.

This was a version that was archived:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080104044407/http://www.kogan.c...

At a glance, they are whitelisting some bots, including Googlebot, but not including Bingbot, and disallowing the rest.

  User-agent: Googlebot
  Disallow: 

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /

Another marketing stunt?

Microsoft themselves want their users to upgrade to latest browsers (see: http://www.ie6countdown.com/) so the idea that they would take issue with someone else doing this (so much so that they'd remove them from bing) seems a bit.. unlikely.

Anyone else thinking they added a robots.txt entry for bing to disallow, waited to get de-listed then removed the offending robots.txt entry, posted this news article knowing bing would pick them back up in a couple of days?

  $ curl -I http://www.kogan.com/robots.txt
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: nginx/1.0.14
  Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2012 18:48:34 GMT
  Content-Type: application/octet-stream
  Content-Length: 79
  Last-Modified: Fri, 04 May 2012 18:58:02 GMT
  Connection: keep-alive
  Accept-Ranges: bytes

I think this is just some random technical glitch that has de-ranked them for some reason at an awkward time, along the lines of Google accidentally marking a legit website as spammy, sending it way down the results. Can it really be proved that this was done directly in response to the IE7 tax? What would the point be anyway? Maybe the storm of incoming links about the IE7 news accidentally got identified as linkfarming somehow?

"we noticed that the www.kogan.com website stopped appearing in organic search results on Microsoft backed search engines"

They don't say explicitly, let alone prove, that the result ever appeared on Bing, while "stopped" would imply that.

If the comments about the wrong robots.txt got it right, it is well possible that the website was never indexed by Bing, and they just noticed it (or decided to talk about it) now.

Funny, the ad I see displayed with the search results is:

  Upgrade from IE6 Today
  Microsoft.com/IE9 Say Goodbye to Outdated Browsers.
  Download the Latest IE Browser Now!

Interesting that it comes up in DDG, which I thought was partially backed by Bing. They augment the results quite a bit, though, so not terribly surprising.

Also, I made myself sad when I typed "kogan.com" into the address bar to test DDG and was shocked when the actual web site came up. Didn't think that one through...

I use Bing, so this is disappointing - but we can only assume it is a mistake, and the most interesting part of this story will be how quickly Microsoft reverts & responds.

Their robots.txt file is being delivered as the wrong content type for me. It is being served as a "application/octet-stream" instead of a "text/html"

I have no idea what consequences this might have since I've never seen another site which does it. Some quick Googling turned up nothing.

Maybe Bing choked on the wrong content type and decided to blackball their entire domain in order to avoid indexing the unindexable?

When I perform a search on bing the first result is the kogan website ...

EDIT: It was the kogan.co.uk and not kogan.com since my country/region = UK

Ruslan Kogan must be rubbing his hands with glee at this development - more pricele$$ free publicity for his site.

Maybe their crawler identifies as IE7?

Just a thought, but I seem to recall that Google was giving higher rankings to sites that advocated upgrading to Chrome, and created a bit of embarrassment.

Given that Kogan.com advocates upgrading and all the linking to their website which occurred recently, perhaps it seems possible that a Microsoft algorithm designed to avoid similar SEO manipulation was triggered.

In other words, the way in which the Kogan.com story unfolded was sufficiently similar to the PR move by Google, that it triggered a Microsoft safeguard.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/247257/google_disciplines_its...

"We never waged war against Microsoft over IE7, we simply wanted people to upgrade their web browsers..."

Maybe so, but the splash says "Use a better browser" and lists Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. It would be ridiculous for Microsoft to remove the page from their search results because of this, but at just a glance, and maybe to the untrained user, it could look like the are waging war on IE as a whole, and not just trying to get users to "simply upgrade their browsers."

I think Microsoft themselves admitted that they do a great deal of manual editing for their search engine rankings.

I reckon this is because the ranking algorithm deranked them when their click through from bing rate declined after the sudden publicity storm. Their #visitors delta probably went very negative after everyone stopped clicking links from various news sites.

They probably shot themselves.

Looks like Kogan only serves the UK and Australian market, there's no support from the US. Perhaps this is a ranking correction to delegating Kogan pages to UK or Oz specific searches rather than global or US.

If this is real, then Microsoft would is going to get into a long legal battle. I hope this is some technical glitch & not some random angry guy at Microsoft

This "tax" is elitist internet bullshit.

I'm all for using any browser that you'd want, but why go through elaborate lengths to put Microsoft down? Especially on a version of IE that's 3 iterations in the past.

I understand that IE7 may not be as great as the other browsers. I'm fine with being annoyed by that. But what about the other versions of IE? Why isn't there a link for IE9 or IE10?