Drive for Quality Initiative
Hello partners!
Microsoft Start consistently strives to provide a high-quality experience to our users across all our platforms and devices. To accomplish this, we have launched the Drive for Quality initiative, which aims to ensure that all the content we feature meets our Publishing Guidelines.
Content quality is of utmost importance to our service, and we have developed algorithms and tools to evaluate and filter out content that does not comply with our standards. These standards include criteria such as accuracy, relevance, originality, readability, diversity, and appropriateness.
The most common reasons for content being blocked are:
• Low quality: Content that is poorly written, formatted, edited, wrongful sourced, or contains grammatical, spelling, or factual errors.
• Crime: Content that focuses on violent, illegal, or harmful activities, or that glorifies or sensationalizes crime or criminals.
• Gossip: Content that spreads rumors, scandals, or personal information about celebrities, public figures, or private individuals in an inappropriate manner, or that invades their privacy or reputation.
• Clickbait: Content that uses misleading, exaggerated, or sensationalized headlines, images, or captions to attract attention and generate traffic, or that does not deliver on its promise.
Enforcement of our publishing guidelines and publication of licensed content is solely at Microsoft's discretion. If your content does not align with our guidelines, the non-compliant brands will not be featured within the Microsoft Start ecosystem, and you will be informed of the same. We value our partners, and we want to help you succeed in the Microsoft Start ecosystem. We understand that partner content may change over time, and we will continue to monitor and adjust our algorithms to ensure that content that meets our standards is promoted.
To enhance content quality and avoid chances of being blocked, we recommend our partners to do the following:
• Review our Publishing Guidelines carefully and make sure that your content is compliant.
• Put on the glasses of a critical journalist and assess the content you provide. Do this as objectively and self-critically as possible and be honest with yourself. Ask yourself questions such as: Is this content accurate, relevant, original, readable, diverse, and appropriate? Does it provide value to the user? Does it match the headline, image, and caption? Does it avoid low quality, crime, gossip, and clickbait?
• Use tools and resources such as spell checkers, grammar checkers, plagiarism checkers, fact-checkers, and editors.
We urge you to write to partnerhubsupport@microsoft.com in case of any issues or concerns.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation. Cheers! 😊
Comments
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@CommunityAdmin@Microsoft Thanks for publishing this information; it certainly is helpful. I have a follow-up for you. I was hoping you could clarify what content being blocked means? Is that at the individual article level or the entire brand? If it is at the individual article level, would that result in an article being "published" in the Microsoft Start backend but not showing up on a brand feed? I have a couple of support cases opened for that issue. Lastly, if a piece of content is blocked, is there a way to provide publishers with what triggered the block? Sometimes you might trigger a rule and you don't know why and you think you are following the guidelines above 100%, so getting that feedback would be extremely helpful for optimizations to stay in compliance.
Thank you!0 -
Hello Kris Lippi
We are referring to content publication for your brand, such as articles, videos, or a gallery being published to Microsoft Start. This information is valuable for ensuring quality and adherence to Microsoft Publishing guidelines and policies.We're pleased to learn that you've raised tickets with our dedicated PHS team at partnerhubsupport@microsoft.com. They specialize in these scenarios and can offer specific insights and assistance. We will notify the team to actively collaborate with you on this case and expedite the process.
Hope this helps!
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