Baidu, the reigning search engine champ in Asia, has caught a serious case of click fraud, and it might work to Google's advantage.

According to an article appearing on the Bizreport site, the click fraud rate on Baidu may be as high as 34%, meaning one-in-three clicks is fraudulent. Baidu has a commanding 58% of the search engine market in China.

Meanwhile, Google, which has roughly 17% of the Chinese market, has set up filtering systems to try to catch click fraud. As a result, it's click fraud rate is estimated at 24%, ten percent lower than that of Baidu, but still way to high by any standards (you'll note in the article, Google reports it misses only .02% of fraudulent clicks).

Could this drive advertisers in China to turn more of their business Google's way? That remains to be seen.

What is certain is that advertisers should not depend on the search engines to take care of the click fraud problem. Wherever you advertise in the world, your best defense against click fraud is a detection tool, such as Zunch's own Click Fraud Detective.

If you are using pay-per-click, or some other form of paid advertising on the Web, you owe it to your bottom line to look into some type of click fraud detection.

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