Does Google hate affiliate marketers? ‘Hate’ may be a little extreme but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Google doesn’t want websites and web pages in its search engine index that it believes add no value to – or junk up – its search results. Unfortunately for many affiliate marketers, Google interprets many affiliate sites as doing exactly that.

Affiliate marketers have long suspected Google’s ire towards them, whether as a result of seeing their sites removed from Google’s index or of having to pay exorbitant pay-per-click costs to advertise in Google Adwords. Recently, a proprietary Google document surfaced on the Internet and in affiliate marketing circles that put all such doubts to rest. The document – which Google has subsequently sought to remove from those who have published it – indicates that Google distrusts, devalues and may even de-index websites that do little more than promote affiliate products or services.

Google’s latest search engine algorithm will impact 35 percent of search engine searches, according to Google Fellow Amit Singal. Hint: it’s all about recency AND relevancy.

Google announced its new ranking algorithm change last Thursday. It builds on the Caffeine web indexing system, which Google introduced in 2010 to allow the search engine to quickly crawl and index the Internet for fresh content on a much larger scale than before.

U.S. mobile social media usage rose by 37 percent in the past year, with 72.2 million Americans accessing social networking sites or blogs via mobile device in August 2011, according to research by comScore, Inc.

Almost 40 million U.S. mobile users – over half of the estimated U.S. mobile social media audience – visit social media sites via mobile each day, reports the research firm.

comScore’s research also shows that, right now, more mobile users access social media sites via their mobile web browser than via a social networking app (42.3 million compared with 38.5 million).

This is likely to change, however. The growth in users accessing social media sites via social networking app is much higher than the growth in access via mobile browser. In the last year those accessing social media sites via mobile browser rose by 24 percent, compared with the huge 126 percent growth in the audience for social networking apps.

1 in 6 Americans or 15 percent of U.S. adults now use an e-reader or electronic reading device, almost double the 8 percent in 2010. What’s more, of those Americans who don’t have an e-reader, 1 in 6 plan to get one in the next 6 months.

Based on a Harris Poll of 2,183 adults in July 2011, those with e-readers also tend to read more than American adults in general. While 16 percent of Americans read 11-20 books per year and 20 percent read 21 or more books per year, a third of e-reader owners (32 percent) read 11-20 books a year and over a quarter (27 percent) read 21 or more books per year.

By 2013, social network advertising revenues will reach $10 billion worldwide, up from $5.54 billion this year, according to eMarketer. Facebook is set to grab the lion’s share of those revenues, with Facebook’s ad sales expected to climb from $3.8 billion this year to $7 billion in 2013 (70 percent of the total).

Twitter’s ad sales are expected to rise from $139.5 million in 2011 to $399.5 million in 2013. LinkedIn will also see impressive ad revenue gains. eMarketer expects LinkedIn’s ad sales to grow from $140.8 million this year to $249.6 million in 2013.

bigmouthmedia’s 2011 survey of U.K. affiliate marketers reveals that search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are the most popular Internet marketing tactics for generating traffic and sales. Affiliates are also embracing social media, with many using all three as well as other marketing tactics.

Here are the top 5 affiliate marketing trends noted by bigmouthmedia:

Here’s a nifty free tool for checking for broken links on your website. It’s called, funnily enough, LinkChecker and it’s one of many handy tools for Internet marketers and webmasters available at Vebtools.

How does it work? Just go to LinkChecker, type in the URL of the webpage you want to test, key in the captcha code and click on the button to let it run.

According to a recent survey of 1,745 business-to-business (B2B) Internet marketers, even the most effective B2B marketing tactics – such as website design, SEO and email marketing – were up to 50 percent LESS effective in 2011 compared with last year.

According to Marketing Sherpa, which conducted the survey, the upshot is that online marketers need to radically improve their game in order to meet the demands of B2B customers in the current economic environment.

Research In Motion’s (RIM’s) BlackBerry is doomed… and Apple’s iPhone will be relegated to runner-up… while Google’s Android operating system is set to become the market leading smartphone operating system. Well, that’s if eMarketer’s research is correct.

According to eMarketer, the end of 2011 will see the iPhone lose its market share leadership. At the same time, Android will end up installed on 37 percent of all smartphone handsets in the United States, a 13 percent increase since 2010.

If the conversion rates of telecommunications marketers are any indication, mobile ads are about 600 percent more effective than standard banner ads.

Research by MediaMind shows that, among telecommunications marketers at least, the conversion rate for mobile ads is six times or 600 percent the performance of standard website banner ads.