I'm not having any issues testing our your URL on my end. Both URLs there seem to redirect properly to the earthsaverequipment.com address.

Are you sure you didn't simply make a typo?

I agree with Alan. Ideally the blog is on the same domain at a location like you suggested (hotelassetsgroup.com/blog). Having an a domain with the keywords are targeting is often helpful, but it's not the end all, be all for ranking for that or other key terms.

Check out this other thread, which is along the same lines: http://www.seomoz.org/q/which-is-better-for-linkbuilding-internal-or-external-blog

In my opinion, neither of these strategies is very good.

Redirecting domains like the marketer suggests will offer no benefit, SEO or otherwise.

Building content on an exact-match domain could work, but why not just try to rank for those exact match terms on the main site? Getting the new domains to rank may still take a good amount of work. If searchers do click through to those sites, they're still going to have to click again to get to the main site. This could be simplified by just doing a good job to bring searchers to the main site directly.

I'm not sure if I can solve all of your issues, but here's a few thoughts:

For #2 - Google is probably just indexing the second page of the lists of posts on your site. You probably don't want to index these pages (and, thus, the meta description becomes irrelevant)

This might be helpful to eliminate that: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/noindex-organize-categories-tags-in-wordpress/

Same deal with archives pages and tag pages - just don't allow Google to index them.

I'm not sure if All-in-One SEO does this, but I believe there are other WP plugins out there than will, too.

Seems like this should work, but I couldn't get it to work for my site. Thanks though

From what I can tell the first site you listed only works with PHP. Otherwise I would definitely go with that.

I'm sure I can find something to work out of the giant list from your second link. Thanks!

Is it possible to generate an XML sitemap for a site without PHP? If so, how?

I think you're right that Google has discounted the value of exact match domains now as it's not as easy to increase rankings solely on the merit of the domain alone. However, I don't agree that exact match domains aren't helpful at all anymore. I see cases all the time where exact match domains are very higher in search rankings in Google. Value of having the exact match domain may be "dying," but I wouldn't say it's dead yet. If this is a new domain with no domain authority, it does you no help to simply redirect from that domain to yours regardless of how good the keywords in the new domain are. At minimum you would need to build up the new domain to get any value out of it (unless you you want to buy the domain just to ensure competitors don't get a hold of it).

Was "volusion-store-design.com" a brand new domain you purchased? Assuming it is, forwarding it to your main site gives absolutely no SEO benefit to your main site. This is because this new URL has no authority so there's not any benefit to pass along to the new site.

Either way, it seems doubtful that either of the two things you described would hurt your rankings. Give it a few days and see what happens to your rankings before trying to figure out if you have a major problem.