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This is something we went through several years back.  Our blog was on Wordpress and hosted separately from our main site.  After years of trying to figure this out, we ultimately just moved the blog under our primary domain, moved all the content over and 301'd the URLs..

While this is a pain, we found that it created a much more pleasant user experience.  We're an ecommerce company, so ultimately we wanted it to be as easy as possible for customers to bounce between our content and our products/cart.  This has also resulted in longer and deeper sessions as well as more overall traffic to both our blog and our ecommerce site.

Hope this helps!

Mike Feiman

There was allegedly a pretty significant update from Google last week (significant for ecommerce sites anyway).

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ecommerce-update-19832.html

Are you seeing a drop in rank, a drop in pages indexed or both?  I assume you've done this already, but checking Google WMT will tell you some of the basics that will provide some insights (how many pages are being crawled, how many errors Google is encountering during the crawl, whether you have a manual action, etc).

If your site isn't under a penalty, I'd give it a few more days to shake out.  We're still seeing several of our rankings jumping around quite a bit from this last rumored update.

As for the 404's, it depends on who you ask and who you believe.  John Mueller at Google says that 404s will not have a negative impact on your SEO (this has been the official word from Google for years):

https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm

Most believe that high bounce rates can cause a drop in rank and lots of 404s can cause a high bounce rate, so 404s can potentially hurt your rankings.

Mike

I totally get where you're coming from.  The squatter situation is extremely frustrating to be sure and isn't getting better any time soon.  If you can't make a trademark claim, it will be extremely difficult to get someone to sell who has no interest in selling.

With regards to settling, I hear what you're saying.  I just personally feel that the .net is too big of an issue to overcome.  Whether we like it or not, people have been trained to throw a .com after everything.  If they see a mention of your brand, they'll likely assume the website will be located at [yourbrandname].com.  If you are using a domain with a .net and someone else has the .com, expect to see quite a bit of your traffic go to the .com.

Think about all the names of companies and brands that are complete nonsense words (or extremely obscure words).  Grabbing a URL that is keyword focused will potentially help you with SEO, but it is often extremely difficult to build a long term brand around.  Also, keep in mind that keyword rich URLs may help in the short term for SEO purposes, but they can be extremely limiting if the company wants to expand beyond the keywords.  Even Moz had to go through this, changing from SEOMoz.org to Moz.com (as the old name limited the brand to being solely focused on SEO).

Hope this helps!

Mike

I'd go .net personally.  Been around longer, more trusted and you won't be sending as much confused/fatfinger traffic to the guy who has the .com as you would if you went with .co (for obvious reasons).

That said, your best option is to come up with a new name for a domain that is either currently available or is available for sale at a reasonable price.  There's no reason to settle for a .net or .co (and you are settling) when there are plenty of viable .com options.  There are countless examples of companies being highly successful with completely made up names.  It isn't about the name.  It's about what you put behind the name from a branding perspective.