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Well you could always use rel=canonical to declare that the canonical version of the page is microsite.com even when you link to it from microsite. company. com.

It would help Google understand that the proper version of the site is the microsite address while leaving links from the main company site pointing and rendering at microsite .company. com.

I suppose that my biggest thing is good analytics and figuring out what your specific KPIs will be for a specific site.  After figuring out the best KPIs, work on those, don't get distracted by keyword rankigns, those can change all to easily when Google decides to chagne the ranking algorithm.

Focus on why we want rankings: to get converting traffic.  If you're spending hours or days working on something, it had better effect the bottom line for the company or it isn't woth doing.

Pining posts is not the same thing as a ping in network terms.  Pinging posts is more eaily described as requesting the post periodically.

Like others have said, make sure the website is fully crawlable and then work on your on-page.  While it is possible to rank without any on-page and even some major crawlability errors, it is so much easier if you have your on-page handled properly.

Another thing to make sure to do is to embed the video on your own site and create a video sitemap.  Google will index the video as being on your site even if it is hosted and available on YouTube.

Or, instead of running Rogerbot locally, we could run some distributed processing (ie. BOINC) to help offload some of the pressure from your cloud?

The <conspiracy hat="">side of things was him commenting that Google is sometimes accused of processing everything in Gmail and could have possibly pulled your link to the demo directory from that.</conspiracy>