Like some giant high school class, Google, through its popularity-based search engine algorithm, rewards the popular and punishes outcasts.
    As a measure of a page's popularity, Google assigns it a page rank (PR). Inbound links (IBLs) from pages with high PRs will raise a page's own rank (the page has, in effect, been graced by the magic touch of a prom king or queen, bestowing a fraction of their popularity upon it). Not surprisingly, this system has been subject to a fair bit of abuse, with avaricious quarterbacks and cheerleaders selling their blessings to viagra and smut peddlers and the like.
    The public form of page ranking is a scale from 1 to 10. How would historical figures have fared in this system?

PR0: Emily Dickinson

No incoming links, no outbound links. This sad orphan website will never be discovered by anyone.

PR2: Shakespeare

The bard would be handicapped by what search engine optimation types call "canonical" issues. There would be no clearly authoritative versions of his pages. What's more, his variant spellings would confuse Google's index:

PR4: Carolus Linneaus

The father of modern taxonomical nomenclature was one of the most influential figures of his time, and he would have a lot of inbound links. Needless to say, his site would be logically structured. His rank, however, would be limited by three factors:

PR6: Leonardo da Vinci

This guy would have killer content. His website would feature excellent graphics and innovative animations and interactive elements. He would be the master of all things web 2.0. Links from high-PR sites by Michelangelo and Raphael, along with some good .edu and .gov links would boost his ratings.

The reason he would be stuck at PR6 is that his website would be too diverse. Google likes a website to have a tight focus, but it would have trouble identifying Leo's main thrust. By dabbling in a variety of things, he would water each one down a little.

I suppose you could say he would be too much of a Renaissance man for SEO.

PR8: Niccolo Machievelli

Machievelli would be what is called a "black hat seo." He would use the whole arsenal of knavery: cloaking, scraping links, keyword stuffing, hidden text, mirror sites, reciprocal link schemes, spoofing competitors and bombarding them with crap links to drain their page rank, posting to forums and wikipedia to get IBLs, hosting multiple dmoz sites under a variety of names, filing false spam reports, and on and on.

Niccolo's websites would all rank in the top three search results for their chosen keywords, but he would occasionally be set back by penalties and bans. No worries: he would have bought up dozens of expired domains with positive PR. He would move his penalized pages over to those addresses, and they would quickly regain their top positions.

PR10: The Buddha

The Buddha's IBLs would be of the prized kind that Google calls "natural." And he would have a lot of them, because many of his messages would resonate with the on-line community, such as:

The Buddha would also be well served by a start-up cadre of sharp South Asian web gurus. He would go on to rapidly recruit legions of talent in West Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere.

But he would teach that search is pointless. What is needed is already found. Increasing acceptance of those teachings would lead to the decline of Google, which would continue losing market share until it would finally be purchased by a group of former Alta Vista executives.

They would repurpose it as a tool for locating holiday-related graphics.