To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes.

It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO admin page on Google, it was just set to "Custom".

I had to stand up a fleet of app servers and caches and databases, and change the load balancers so that Google basically had their own infrastructure (although we would shunt all crawlers there). Crawler traffic was very different than regular traffic -- it looked at pages more than two days old, something humans rarely did at the time. It would blow out every cache (memory, database, disk, etc.). So we put them on their own infra to keep them from killing the rest of the site.

And now I will hang an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.