We mentioned on our homepage that the reason we had to come up with a new domain name was because of action from Keurig Mountain Coffee Inc., the trademark owners of the name Keurig.
During the summer this year we received a letter from Keurig requesting us to stop using the website name keurigtroubleshooting.com, as they were the owners of the registered trade mark “Keurig” and were concerned that our site was in some way having a negative impact upon the image of that brand. So we thought we better check first on this claimed ownership, and yes they do own it and it isn’t expired (or “dead” as it is referred to as). You can use the search tool by following this link, quite interesting to see what is registered: tmsearch.uspto.gov
One of the issues we did rather object to in their letter was the suggestion that our advice would in some way cause problems with their brewers and that it was not as good as that which was provided by Keurig themselves. The irony of this of course was one of the reasons we developed the site was that the general quality of their advice through their help pages was so poor. It was clearly an area that Keurig had not devoted much time to.
Having said all of that receiving a letter from a $3.4 billion company regarding our very modest site was rather off-putting and so we moved sites to prevent any further problems going forward. However, in reviewing our situation and options available we did note there are many, and older, sites out their with Keurig’s trademarks in their domain names. For example K-Cup, Keurig, M K-Cup and others that Keurig do not seem to have taken any action against. And having looked at the advice being provided by some of those sites, its poor at best. With a lot of it looking like it is copied or the writer having very little understanding of how these brewers work.
In any case we moved sites and so put in place what they call 301 re-directs. Some of you may well have arrived here through one of those re-directs. These enabled us to map across from the old site to the new site the exact pages and changes in pages that we developed later. This was a very useful feature and Google provides some good guidance on this if its something you ever need to do in the future.
Over all it wasn’t a very nice experience, but we do understand why trademark owners need to protect their brands; so no real issue with that. But we would like to see a more consistent application of their brand protection so that people know where they stand. When we purchased the domain, with the large number of domains that included the name Keurig or K-Cup, it certainly looked like Keurig did not worry about such things. And perhaps in the past they didn’t, but they certainly do these days – if not consistently.
So that is our little story about why we our site had it’s name changed.