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Fascinating new research carried out in April this year suggests that the most visible online poker sites in the U.S. are not necessarily high profile sites taking US business like PokerStars.com and Full Tilt Poker.com.
Instead, the European-focused sites Party Poker and 888 top the American visibility list.
The research, carried out by search engine marketing firm Greenlight was based on the US version of the 
world's largest search engine Google, which claims 90 percent of Internet search engine traffic. Greenlight used terms like "online poker," "poker chips," and the word "poker" during the month of April and recorded which names surfaced most in page one positions.
Despite an absence from the US market of some three years since the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed in 2006, Party Poker and 888 proved to be the online poker brands that achieved the most visibility, enjoying a higher profile than Full Tilt and PokerStars, which are the biggest Internet poker sites in the world....and still take US action!
Greenlight reports that PartyPoker was seen on the first page of results for 45 percent of searches, followed by 888 on 44 percent. PokerStars was in third place with 37 percent of results, while Full Tilt came in 13th place with 11 percent.
Other popular online poker sites that featured in Greenlight's top twenty included Pacificpoker.com (26 percent), PKR Poker.com (15 percent) and a number of poker information sites such as Pokerlistings.com (24 percent), Launchpoker.com (9 percent) and Pokerjunkie.com (14 percent).
Beating them all on poker searches, however, was online encyclopaedia Wikipedia which appeared on the first page of results for 57 percent of results. The report concluded that “this proves site credibility and depth of content can improve rankings.”
Greenlight found that the simple word 'poker' was the most effective poker search term and was used by 37 percent of searchers. "Online poker" was next most popular at 8 percent.
