How to rebound from a network wheel?

[CLTMichael]

I own over 40 real estate websites that linked to each other for certain keywords.  This worked for a long time and now has not.    All had unique content, but pretty much used the same template for design.  I do have some very good content on each website.

How should I go about getting un penalized?  Will killing all the text links to all the sites help?  Looking for solid advice here and thank you for your time.

[TakeshiYoung]

How do you know that you've been "penalized"? If it's Penguin penalty, avoid using exact keyword match anchors when linking between your domains. And diversify your link profile by building more external links.

[CLTMichael]

Takeshi, thank you for your reply.  I tried to respond earlier, but MOZ was logging me out when I tried to respond.

That's a very good question.  I started losing rank during penguin 1 and penguin 2.   I use 3 different keywords for each website moving it up.  60/20/20 with 60 % being the main keyword using the same anchor text.    Any other suggestions you can give would be fantastic.

[KeriMorgret]

Have you checked out http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal? It might have some useful ideas. Matt Cutts even gave it a tweet of approval.

[CLTMichael]

Keri, now I have a lot of reading to do.  I will read this and get back to you.  May take a day or two!

[CLTMichael]

Under Manual Actions "No manual webspam actions found."

So what do I do next?

All of my websites do link to each other.
They are on the same IP address. (I told webhost to spread across 5 IP's and they didn't)
Each website is templated based.

=[