Sponsor the WEX Legal Encyclopedia
"Cornell’s LII WEX has extremely high quality traffic. Our conversion rates from LII WEX to JustAnswer.com are the highest we have ever seen and higher than conventional wisdom says is possible."
-Ron Drabkin, VP Business Development, Justanswer.com: an LII advertiser
When you sponsor Wex pages of your choice, you are given an advertisement with a custom link and message on that legal dictionary/encyclopedia entry. This gives your message a very targeted audience looking for a specific legal topic - like Bankruptcy, Copyright, Employment Discrimination, etc. Scroll down to see a more comprehensive list.
Because of Wex's popularity and because we've never offered this type of opportunity before, we expect these opportunities to go fast.
Contact Austin Groothuis, 312-906-5303 or ag654@cornell.edu, or with questions or use this form to reserve your sponsorship slot.
More details about Wex and Wex sponsorships below:
- Pricing, Availability, and How Sponsorship Works
- What is Wex?
- Why should I sponsor?
- Website analytics
- Why should I not sponsor (and our nofollow policy)?
- Ad Specifications
Pricing and Availability
Wex entries are grouped into tiers based on traffic and demand for the subject matter. The highest tier prices vary, but the rest are set. The chart below shows our most popular pages, and you will find a comprehensive list of Wex entries at the bottom of the chart.
Click the entry name to go to that page. Contact Austin, 312-906-5303, or use this form for questions or to reserve the page of your choice.
Reserve the Wex page of your choice while it is available. Contact Austin Groothuis, 312-906-5303 or use this form.
What is Wex?
Wex is the web’s most widely-read collaboratively-created, free legal dictionary and encyclopedia. It is one of the most trusted legal information sources online. As a result, Wex’s entries often place very high in searches for common legal phrases (Google "immigration law" or other legal phrases and see where the LII Wex entry is. It's a fun game!).
Wex is published by Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute (LII, www.law.cornell.edu), an organization that seeks to bring free electronic legal information to everyone. Visit LII for more information.
Why Should I Sponsor?
High Traffic: You will see from the usage statistics below that LII’s web pages are some of the most searched, found, and viewed legal information entries online. A well placed, targeted sponsorship ad should send thousands of people to your site.
Doing Well by Doing Good: Besides the obvious business benefits of attaching your brand to Wex, sponsoring shows your support for the LII, an organization whom many (government agencies, police forces, pro bono attorneys, unrepresented litigants, etc.) rely on for free, accurate, & timely information that may otherwise be costly.
Goodwill: A static and tasteful sponsorship message to Wex readers, whom trust LII for reliable legal information, will bring a high level of goodwill to your brand.
Prestige: Imagine, if you are an employment lawyer, attaching your name to one of the highest-ranking search entries for the keywords “employment law." Since this is our first offering, a number of unique opportunities like this are currently available. But they won’t last long.
Reserve the Wex page of your choice while it is available.
Website Analytics and Statistics
LII’s website is one of the most trusted sources of free, in-depth legal information and analysis on the web. The numbers are for May ‘08 - May ’09. If you want more specific data please contact Austin, ag654@cornell.edu or 312-906-5303, or use this form.
High traffic: LII’s website is one of the most frequently visited legal sites on the internet:
- Accessed over 18,889,000 times with over 72,080,900 page views in the last year.
- 12,774,087 of those were unique visitors.
Search Visibility: Like most sites, much of LII’s traffic comes from search engines (over 12,000,000 visits from search engines last year). The difference with LII is its uniquely high rank for common legal phrases and keywords with search sites like Google. Take a look at LII’s top ten keyword referrals from all search engines:
Top Ten Keyword Referrals
- us constitution
- federal rules of civil procedure
- bill of rights
- supreme court justices
- u.s. constitution
- federal rules of evidence
- internal revenue code
- ucc
- us code
- first amendment
High-Quality Referring Sites: In addition to high-volume search traffic, LII has a reliable stream of referrals from trusted websites. A total of 4,151,845 visits came from referrals via 58,438 sources. Below are some of LII’s top 25 external/non-search-engine referrers from last year:
| Sampling of LII’s top Referrers | |
| wikipedia.org (1) | irs.gov (2) |
| epa.gov (8) | govtrack.us (9) |
| dol.gov (10) | aa.usno.navy.mil (12) |
| ftc.gov (14) | uscourts.gov (19) |
| usdoj.gov (22) | travel.state.gov (24) |
Why Should I NOT Sponsor (Attempted PageRank Manipulation and Our nofollow Policy)?
LII's website is a highly trusted legal information resource. Maybe the web's most trusted. Not coincidentally, our search engine placement is very high. You should sponsor a page because it will bring you impressions, clicks, referrals, name recognition, and goodwill.
However, if you are looking for us to directly pass our PageRank and search engine placement to you, or if you wish to directly manipulate your search engine placement through a link, we do not welcome your sponsorship.
We use the nofollow tag, as your contract will explictly state, on all paid sponsors' links. This is inline with Google's policies which are absolutely clear; relevant or irrelevant, all paid links are to have a nofollow tag. Here is the official Google blog post that best articulates the reasoning for our (and Google's) policy.
If sponsored links do not have the nofollow tag, we risk being penalized as the post indicates. This would leave our site crippled and our sponsors' links worth less (or worthless) in the long run. There is no offer that we will accept to make a sponsored link without the nofollow tag.
But remember, our sponsorships are priced with the nofollow tag in mind, so we encourage you to sponsor because of the referrals, goodwill, and eyeballs a sponsorship will bring you.
Ad Specifications
Ads are text-based with one URL. You can choose the text of your sponsorship, following our guidelines below. But we reserve the right to accept or decline ads for any (or no) reason. Hint: If you follow Google's text advertising standards, in general, there will probably be no problems.
Ad Placement: See an example of the placement of Ads on a Wex page.
Character Limitations: Wex sponsorship ads must adhere to the following character limitations, including spaces:
- 24-character headline (20 recommended)
- 50-character first line
- 50-character second line (optional)
- 27-character link text (visible text of any URL, does not need to exactly match actual link)
- 1024-character URL (actual link).
NOTE: all links from LII sponsorship ads are implemented as "nofollow" links. Please see above why we do While this may reduce their immediate SEO impact, we believe that it is in the best long-term interest of our clients not to game Google.
Use this form or contact Austin, ag654@cornell.edu or 312-906-5303, to reserve your sponsorship slot.
