(We couldn’t have landed #16 without you, MMc AA)

I’m going to be honest with you, here — it’s a slow news day. But instead of phoning in a post about the Comcast/FOX deal or Holly Holm’s Bellator debut, I’m going to try something much, much less interesting.

This morning, I discovered that a Google search for ‘new york mma regulation’ returns CagePotato articles in the first three spots, which is kind of exciting for us SEO-minded types. So I started wondering: What other general MMA-related search terms return CagePotato articles in the #1 spot? After about 15 minutes of idle searching, I was able to find dozens of them, and I decided to rank the top 33 below, based on total number of results that come back from that search. As it turns out, the list is a fairly complete overview of the coverage we’ve produced over the last five years — and a reminder of where our priorities tend to land.

The moral of the story? CagePotato might be marginalized as a jokey shitsite from time to time, but our impact on the Internet is kind of indisputable. So let’s give ourselves a self-high-five and proceed…

1. nba mma (#1 out of 114,000,000 results)
2. punch face (#1 out of 107,000,000)
3. bad ufc journalism (#1 out of 68,900,000; we also rank #1 for shitty ufc journalism — success!)
4. british ring girls (#1 out of 40,800,000)
5. mma funny (#1 and #2 out of 39,500,000)
6. brazilian ring girls (#1 and #2 out of 35,600,000)
7. worst fighters (#1 and #2 out of 29,600,000)
8. nude ring girls (#1 and #2 out of 21,000,000)
9. mma weight cuts (#1, #2, and #3 out of 16,200,000)
10. ugly mma t-shirts (#1 and #2 out of 13,900,000)
11. japanese freak show (#1 out of 9,160,000)
12. fist pose (#1 and #2 out of 7,240,000)

(Oh yeah. Get ready for a whole lot of this.)

By now, you should have finally made it through our gargantuan 2012 Potato Awards feature, which recapped the biggest and baddest MMA news stories of last year, as viewed through the twisted mirrors of the CagePotato Funhouse. This week we decided to throw together another year-in-review feature, in which the members of the CP staff selected their favorite articles that they wrote for the site in 2012. Check out our picks below, click the headlines to revisit our work, and if we left out any of your own personal faves, holler at us in the comments section.

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CagePotato Tribute: The 50 Worst Fighters in UFC History

BG says: In five years of running CagePotato, this is probably the article I’m most proud of. Part of that is simply because of the massive effort it required — by the time the “50 Worst” reached its final form, I had been writing and researching it, off and on, for about six months. I liked the idea of doing a shadow-history of the UFC, giving readers a guided tour of how the Octagon’s forgotten losers and punching-bags did so much to build the sport’s mythology in their own right, by acting as fodder for the legends. I believe it’s the most definitive record of UFC failure, in all its various forms, ever committed to the Internet.

21 MMA Ring Girls Who Have Posed Nude: A NSFW Celebration

BG says: Well, you can’t argue with success. Since its publication in August, this article has generated over 2 million pageviews, making it by far the most popular CagePotato article of all time, in terms of raw numbers. And let’s be honest: Spending an afternoon searching for nude photos of Jade Bryce isn’t exactly a tough day at the office.

Dead MMA Fighter of the Month: Justin Levens

BG says: I took a lot of heat for this piece, for everything from the title (“disrespectful!”) to the concept itself (“why pay tribute to this asshole?!”), but I found it really interesting to sort through all the available information on Levens, then shape it into a single narrative, spanning his rough childhood, to his early successes, to the setbacks that ultimately derailed his life. It’s a terrible story, but an undeniably compelling one.