Last week Yahoo! launched its Traffic Quality Center - a resource for advertisers concerned about click fraud. This week Google has followed-suit with the announcement of its own Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

Both sites serve a similar purpose: informing website owners about click fraud issues. Click fraud is an issue that plagues both companies so I’m glad to see them both address the problem.

But is one company doing a better job with their click fraud resource? I think so. Yahoo’s Traffic Quality Center has more real information than Google’s. The Google Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center looks like an afterthought - “uh oh… Yahoo! has a site dedicated to click fraud… we should probably have one, too”.

First of all, look at the menu options at Google’s Traffic Quality Center: Home, Overview, Technical Talk, Help Center, Contact Us. The Home page is just an introduction to what the site is about (which could just be combined with the Overview page). The Contact Us page is just that - a contact page. The Help Center has 7 links to existing help topics. The Overview page is a sparse page of words and some graphics. The Technical Talk page has links to three articles and three blogs.

Yahoo’s Traffic Quality Center, on the other hand, contains a lot more information. The Home page has links to important announcements, Q&As, and links to recent posts on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. The What We’re Doing page is a solid page of text (although no great details) on different ways that Yahoo! combats click fraud. No fancy graphics - just content. The Click Investigation tab walks you step-by-step through the process of starting a click fraud investigation (and there’s a graphic… woo hoo!). The Tips & Tools tab is several pages of solid text, how to’s, and yes… graphics. The FAQ tab is just that: a 13-point FAQ. The Resource tab is a good three pages of both internal and external blogs, forums, organizations, news articles, and press releases dealing with click fraud issues.

Can you judge the quality of a product simply by how much information is there? No. Of course not. But spend time at both sites and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. I’m happy that Google feels the need to address the issue with it’s own site. But they really could do more about providing website owners with a bit more useful information - especially stuff that isn’t already available in the existing AdWords Help.