Item requirements apply to all markets and all publishers, but certain markets or business cases may require additional fields. Contact us at PartnerHubSupport@microsoft.com if you have additional feed item requirements.
All feed items are required to have a Unique ID, Title, and Publish Date, but other fields may be required depending on item type. MSN recommends filling out optional fields as well for best performance.
Updating Previously Ingested Items
Updated content must be flagged to Microsoft Ingestion Services via changes to the Updated Date or Publish Date fields. Updated content without changes to one of these fields will be skipped. Remember to preserve the same Unique ID.
Microsoft Ingestion Services parses the feed and splits it into items, deciding whether to publish a new item, update an existing item, or skip it.
Avoiding Duplicates
Feed items are identified by their Unique ID. Items with the same Unique ID are ruled as duplicates and skipped unless they have been flagged as updates via changes to the Updated Date or Publish Date fields. Feeds that automatically update Unique ID, Updated Date, or Publish Date every time the feed is polled will not be ingested.
Avoiding Defects
Defects such as flawed formatting, invalid dates, or low-quality media embeds can result in a poor user experience and may limit your content's reach. Learn more about what defects to avoid on the Content Ranking page in the Publishing Guidelines section.
Date Formats
To ensure our content is relevant to our consumers we must make sure the articles we show them are accurately dated. Dates must be expressed using RFC 3339 or RFC 822 date formats. Any text in the date string should be in English, and timezones should be expressed in UTC rather than any local timezone such as Eastern Standard Time.
RFC3339
2022-12-28T07:20:50.52Z
2022-12-28T07:20:50.52-07:00
2022-12-28T07:20:50.52+04:00
RFC822
Wed, 02 Oct 2002 13:00:00 GMT
Wed, 02 Oct 2002 15:00:00 +0200
Updating Inline Videos
Videos can be published inline via Media RSS or HTML. The video URL is its unique ID. Any HTML video with the same url will be flagged as a duplicate and skipped, but videos using Media RSS can be updated if <dcterms:modified> is updated. If this field is not updated, the video will be considered a duplicate.
[SCREENSHOT REQUESTED]
Updating Slideshows
Slideshows published via Media RSS can set <dcterms:modified> to a new date to indicate that the slideshow has been updated.
[SCREENSHOT REQUESTED]
Updating Images
An image’s source URL is its unique ID. Images with the same URL will be flagged as duplicates and skipped.
Unpublishing Feed Items
Any previously-ingested item can be taken down by setting its expiration date to the past. Update <dcterms:valid> and remember to update the Updated Date field to trigger ingestion to propagate the change.
