I really appreciate all that effort you put in to ensure your method was correct. many thanks.

I would certainly pay attention to your individual key phrases, but more importantly is the traffic source - check if Bing, Yahoo, Google, Direct or any other traffic channel is causing you the loss of traffic. Once you can determine the problematic traffic source, you can then investigate the keywords in that traffic channel. Analytics allows you to setup custom segments to analyze each traffic source individually. After you can pinpoint the problematic keywords, you should analyze what the competitors are up to as others recommended.

Thanks. I want to make sure I get this right in a syntax universally understood by all engines. I have seen webmasters all over the place on this one with some saying that crawlers use a first matching rule and others that say that crawlers use a last matching rule. I am almost thinking to have the allow command twice - before and after, to cover all bases.

You need to research on exactly what channel of traffic has declined and then you can start analyzing the cause of loss. I would spend time analyzing each traffic channel and check for things like unique search queries and unique landing pages per channel. I would also pay attention to the Google and Bing Webmaster tools and check for crawl issues.

If I want to override a Disallow directive in robots.txt with an Allow command, do I have the Allow command before or after the Disallow command?

example:

Allow: /models/ford///page*

Disallow: /models////page

it depends on the PR of the site, if site A is a aged well established site with good PR that you want to be passed to site B then keep the 301s.

If site B is a brand new site, understand that cancelling the 301 will negatively affect site B and if site A pages are still indexed and getting a lot of traffic you will lose that traffic.

If you are creating a new site A, and the existing site A has good PR then your new site A will hit the ground running since it's aged, just 301 the pages internally to the new url structure so you don't 404 internal pages with PR.

BOTW is just another link and citation. If you are having trouble getting quality links naturally from around the web, then BOTW is most likely worth the money. I heard a recent Matt Cutts video where he did speak favorably of BOTW. However, I strongly advise you to try to create likable content that can easily be shared.