Before the Spez-Moderator kerfluffle broke out an article said that reddit's c-suite had finally recognized that search engines were being used to drill deep into /r for review-type posts or direct answers to questions --many with 'reddit' as part of the original search phrase. (I do it all the time.) Reddit was re-focusing on seo to build that traffic even more. I can't find the article now.
IIRC (and I'm very fuzzy on this, so I may be wrong), they were working directly with the search engines.