The two get aggregated or the most restrictive gets used so in this case, you'd get

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

Ron,

Go ahead and create your new gallery and 301 redirect the old gallery pages to the main page of your new gallery and you'll be fine.  I can't think of any real good reason your old SEO would claim doing it like that would be a big benefit to you.

Quality content is good but it's not enough by itself.  Here's the "formula":

• Define and understand the wants and needs of the target audience(s). (marketing)
• Research and interact with your audience(s) and learn what blogs and social profiles influence them. (social media)
• Research and establish relationships with audience influencers to understand their goals   (PR)
• Create content that achieves the goals of the influencers and that the audience will consume, endorse and share. (content creation)
• Implement authorship and understand what makes a link valuable (SEO)
• Reach out to influencers to publish your content

Rinse and repeat.

Bob,

Don't get focused on the PR of your back links. Relevancy and quality are what matter most.  A thematically relevant site with quality content and a PR of 0 that links out to you for all the right reasons is a good link. It may be a future PR 1,2,3 or more site and it can bring traffic to your site, in addition to balancing out anchor text and providing domain diversity.  Another thing, almost all sites come and go so basing your link building on the likelihood of a site being around in a few years isn't a good strategy to follow.

Define the goal for your blog, categorize as appropriate for keywords and the content you will need to create to achieve your goal and then, create your blog posts to fit within your categories.

As far as which is getting more traffic and why, is the traffic you're looking at going to category pages or individual blog posts? More "coverage on Google page 1" doesn't mean anything if it's not earning traffic to the site.  Are the blog posts bringing in search traffic?  If they are and that traffic is going to the individual posts, then it may be that the posts are better optimizer or the topics you're writing about on the new blog are better chosen.  If you're seeing traffic going to the category pages for category keywords on one site but not the other, maybe your keyword research for the category pages wasn't done well enough, maybe you just have to give it more time, or maybe you have to take a look at your internal and external links to see why one site is out performing the other.

I think you should consider how successfully you can fold-in the old domain (name)  into the brand you want to create. Domain names as anchor text isn't that big of a think anymore--looking forward, the brand is more important thing.  If you think you might look back in a year or two and say "this domain name is just not working for us as part of our brand message" I'd go with the new domain.

I'd say it's not the domain name that's as much of an immediate issue as the link anchor text and the theme of the pages those links are on.  If those are not relevant to your site, and you have a domain name that is more appropriate to your business, I'd go with the new domain--I'm not even sure I'd do a redirect, in that case.  If the links are relevant and of decent quality, I think I'd go ahead and use the expired domain.