People are angry with Google for abusing their power as a search engine to prevent journalists publishing true negative stories about Google.
I don't think people are going to be less angry after you explain that Google are doing this via the "clever hack" of informing the news site's SEO team about the negative story under NDA and using that to bind the site's journalists.
> The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.
I suppose that Google counsel could have thought this through in advance, and realized that they could block press coverage by using NDAs with media organizations. But that seems like an iffy strategy.
No actually, i'm not. As my profile says, at Google i run the C++ language teams. I gave up lawyering in any capacity for Google years ago.