Content marketing company Outbrain says it is tightening guidelines to outlaw “overly commercial” material and increase credibility.

Restrictions now clamp down on spammy – yet they say, increasingly popular – content tactics such as inaccurate, sensational, misleading or otherwise “too-good-to-be-true” headlines.

The ad headlines typically appear alongside news reports to encourage readers to view content elsewhere. Outbrain marketing vice president Rich Ullman says the company has also taken on a full-time content strategist to “enforce and further develop” the guidelines, and allocated more resources to monitoring.

“If users can’t trust the efficacy of the content we recommend, a potentially valuable service to publishers, readers and marketers could be jeopardised,” he says.

An internal audit in 2012 uncovered “a number of unscrupulous players” and their content was scrubbed from the network. Latest efforts include another sweep, the new guidelines and resources, and extension of manual tools to enable publishers to remove suspect content.

• Outbrain has announced a strategic partnership with content licensing and management software specialist NewsCred, giving users access to content from more than 4500 providers. The Outbrain API has also been integrated into the NewsCred content marketing cloud.