A better idea is to offer a free, limited version with no support and premium versions with support. That way your time is focused on those willing to pay and anyone who needs it free has to find someone to help when they get stuck. That gives them an incentive to upgrade while still making your SaaS visible to new users. I think Trello has it right; the free version has us onboarding hundreds of new users for them and teaching them to use it and the paid version is worth paying for if you need to control your users.
Contains new research data compiled by GoDataFeed on Product Listing Ads, Marketplaces and Comparison Shopping Engines - which have the largest user bases. Some insights into where shoppers spend the most.
Yours is not the only small business I've seen executed by Google. 100% of the sites I've written content for or managed AdWords accounts for have been penalized over the years. My solution is to focus on getting traffic from anywhere but them.
No, they aren't. Google is using FUD to scare sites into requesting links be removed that they never built on legitimate sites. No one can possibly guess which links an individual Googler will think "might" be paid. I assure you they guess wrong most of the time.
As Google penalizes the best writers and blogs, one of two things happens:
1) Entire sites are being nofollowed - removing links to deserving sites.
2) The site refused to nofollow, so they stay penalized with PR0 no matter how good the site may be or how high the PR once was.
The end result will be that even more black hat spammy MFA sites will rank. Sites that deserved to be written about and linked to will drop and be invisible.
It is high time people stop defending Google when they are destroying small businesses and costing much needed jobs. Now Cutts has declared war on bloggers who often make a living writing.
Google wants to destroy any site that enables advertisers and businesses to connect with sites where their target audience already is by forcing publishers to decide whether they want to risk losing organic traffic and being branded with a scarlet PR0 or to nofollow everything they ever write.
Nofollow = NOT TRUSTED. We do not invest time writing about anything we do not trust. (On the VERY rare occasion we do we do not link to them.) We do not publish content that does not fit our audience.
Every link is a potential risk. Nofollowing links may damage the sites we link to so what is a writer who already cares about what they write about supposed to do?
Google has a monopoly on search because the wealthy elite who own the media handed it to them. People use it because in many cases they do not even know there is an alternative. Many use whatever is installed on their computers without even having any idea what it even is.
People who are trying to clean up unnatural links penalties are not SEO experts. They rely on tools to tell them what links to remove. These tools are not very accurate. I've had them flag DMOZ, Best of the Web, and Business2Community as "toxic". Finally many remove and/or disavow every link in desperation.
How does all that disavowing affect search results and individual sites? How many verify that requests to remove organically given links are from the actual site and not their unethical competitor. (Hint: almost none.)
Many businesses fail waiting for recovery. Others get penalties lifted, but having removed links they no longer get any traffic.
"Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop." YES, they most certainly DID!
Everything Google does benefits big brands. This hurts small business and that has obviously been their goal since their CEO said the Internet is a "cesspool" and favoring big brands is how we're going to clean it up.
Google has a virtual monopoly on paid and organic search. Nothing converts as well as search. They are severely damaging small businesses right and left. It takes dozens of other sources of customers to replace Google.
Allowing Google to take over the Internet as we know it and turn it into their own personal business is dangerous and unethical. That is why since commerce began we have been warned about the dangers of monopolies. They became a monopoly through the media - both owned by the wealthy elite. The media chooses the winners from the products they built in the first place.
If you use Google Shopping to display your products I encourage you to log out of Google and go see what they actually display. You are likely to find that your products never show up for the money keyword phrases even when you specify you only want to see the products in your store. But search on something general and you'll confirm all your products are in their feed. That is an even larger issue than watermarks. Both are symptoms of Google being far too powerful. I first wrote about that in http://growmap.com/farmer-update-google-competitors/
Each major "Borg" site first hands small business a way to make money more easily and then starts taking it away. That is how AdWords worked, and now organic, Google Shopping, Facebook, etc. Expect it with Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat - any entity that is "Borg".
Users handed Google all this power and they can take it away, but first businesses and bloggers must offer them alternatives and make it clear why we need to use something else.
I know that sounds unlikely, but the tide does eventually turn. Wal-mart killed small towns across America - but they are making a comeback now that people realize what it cost them to be obsessed with cheap. We can do the same online, but it won't happen overnight.
"On the other hand running my business the way I want doesn't present a clear harm to others, so I can't."
I beg to differ. How corporations are run harms so many others that it amazes me that you would even say that. What about all the "down-sized" workers whose pensions were gutted and benefits taken away - or the workers who lose their lives because companies care more about the bottom line than they do about safety?
Has it ever occurred to you that whoever has the most money can manipulate stock prices so any investor is in not one of the insiders is a mark? It boggles my mind that so few investors realize the game is certainly rigged and they ARE going to consistently lose. Why not just go to a casino? There - at least theoretically - you know what the takeout is and can decide whether you get enough "fun" from your losses to make you think it worthwhile. Gambling is gambling and the house always wins.
What a marvelous discussion because it encourages the inherently self-absorbed to reveal their belief systems which nearly always include the worship of self, money, and power as their only true gods.
I highly recommend they all watch the Canadian Documentary 'The Corporation' which clearly illustrates why corporations ARE like psychopaths - and generally run by people who also meet the definition. The movie is available free online.
Corporations as they currently exist are inherently unethical and unsustainable because by focusing on short term gain and stock values they are destroying the real value they once had.
Either social responsibility and long term goals must be injected back into corporations or they need to be boycotted by everyone with a conscience or ideally have their corporate charters revoked.