Relevance and quality

Ads must:

• Be clear, truthful, and accurate.
• Be correctly constructed: Ads should be grammatically correct, not include misspellings, and be formatted correctly.
• Manage expectations:
  • Ads should not mislead.
  • Ads must be highly relevant to the product, services or information presented on your landing page, or the general content, purpose, and theme of your site.
  • When an ad implies that a product is for sale, the landing page must allow the purchase of that product.

For information about how to format and create your ads, please see our General Ad Requirements policies.

Sites may be excluded if there is reason to believe that their advertising or business practices are potentially malicious, harmful, or deceptive or they consistently violate Microsoft’s policies. For more information, please see the Legal, Privacy and Security policies.

The following are examples of sites that may be completely excluded from the marketplace:

• Sites that include viruses, malware, spyware, or other self-installing programs.
• Business models that attempt to mislead site visitors, or that seem deceptive or fraudulent.
• Phishing sites that try to trick visitors into sharing personal data for fraudulent purposes, such as stealing one’s identity.
• Pages that consist entirely of advertising, or whose main purpose is to direct site visitors to advertising.
• Link farms.
• Parked domains.
• Sites operated by advertisers who consistently violate our policies or in the case of Search Ads, submit large numbers of irrelevant keywords.

The functionality of your site should not surprise site visitors or interfere with a user’s ability to navigate, and disruptive or deceptive content is not allowed. Navigation buttons should operate in a standard and predictable manner, and sites and all parts of the page content should load properly.

• Your landing page must be available and reliably responsive even at peak use times.
• Your final URL must resolve to a single static landing page; it may not take users to a different page on the site each time the ad is clicked.
• Use a landing page that you own or control, or that you are authorized to represent or send traffic to.
• Landing pages that appear as editorial cannot include disclaimers or language such as Breaking News, Shocking Discovery, Special Report, Consumer News, Consumer Alerts, etc., that may make a user believe they are viewing editorial/news content.
• Ads may not contain fake news reports or refer to fake news containing unsubstantiated, unsourced claims.
• Ads must link to a landing page with content that matches the headline on the ad -- the user should not have to click again (or multiple times) to get to the content referred to in the ad headline. If there is a photo gallery on the landing page, the exact topic from the ad headline/image must be within the first five slides of the slideshow on the landing page.
• Content on the corresponding landing page must be accurate, up to date, and of high quality and taste.
• Advertorial landing pages must be clearly labeled as an Advertisement or Advertorial.  The labeling must be at the top of the page; in the same font size as the main font on the advertorial or larger, and in a font color that stands out from the page background.
• The landing page must not:
  • Generate any disruptive pop-ups or pop-unders. Please note that functionalities that are part of the site’s expected experience or otherwise non-intrusive or user initiated, such as an age verification or log-in for example, would be acceptable.
  • Spawn multiple pop-ups or any pop-up that prevents visitors from leaving the site.
    
  • Open any additional windows.
  • Mislead the user with "fake" dialog boxes or browser windows.
  • Be designed to look broken or simulate a non-working webpage in any way.
  • Use "fake" close behavior. For example, when a user clicks a "close" button on the page, it should close that page, and no other behavior should result:
    

Landing pages should enable users to find the products, services, or information they request easily, or assists users by informing or shortening their buying or research process. Your landing page should provide clear, direct access to content that is related to your ads and in the case of Search Ads, keywords and should not obstruct, delay, or confuse users. Landing page and site content should not function primarily to support the display of advertising or attract traffic.

Sites or landing pages may be considered low-quality content if they:

• Use doorway pages or cloaking.
• Without the user's consent:
  • Change browser preferences or resetting default home pages.
  • Resize browser windows or disabling browser buttons.

• Do not open properly or consistently result in a “product not available” message.
• Redirect site visitors unexpectedly to unrelated domains.

• Display a high density of advertising above the fold, and/or consist significantly of advertising or links.

• Feature content that functions primarily to support ad monetization.
• Are built for search engines and feature excessive off-topic keywords or pages that feature hard-to-read text.
• Consistently feature sparse or limited content, particularly where the user would expect to find a range of offers, products or information on a similar site.

• Exist only to redirect to other businesses without adding significant value as an intermediary, e.g., by providing enhanced pricing, product, or merchant information.
• Misrepresent the origin or intent of their content and as a result are likely to deceive a portion of the target audience.
• Require the entry of personal data unnecessary for the purposes of providing services or completing a purchase.

Please note, sites driving users directly to a sign-up or login page must enable the user to link back to the main home page or supporting content describing services and terms of use.

• Delay or obstruct the user’s access to requested content, products or services by adding steps solely designed to monetize the user.

• Employ marketing tactics that might be considered evasive, overly sensational, or potentially confusing.
• It must be noted in ad copy if access to content or services requires a software download (e.g., toolbars):

The user would expect online content, but it is delivered in an offline format (such as SMS information services).