Recovery from manual penalty, several sites sell same products

[Storesco]

We are still struggling with the consequences of a manual penalty. Here the history

• we got a manual penalty in September 2013 on our main site kinderwagen.com for unnatural links
• we cleaned up our link profile and the penalty was lifted in February 2014
• we did nothing in terms of link building until December 2014
• from December 2014 we started to build natural links, we mostly gave away our products for reviews, that way we built first one content link per month now 2-3 content links per months
• we expanded our social acitivities on facebook and google plus
• we started a blog in the beginning of this year and rewrote our guide section

For now the results of all this have been very modest. We are basically still stuck where we were after the penalty.

In contrast our sites in other languages where we do similar activities perform quite well.

There is one difference

• in Germany (where this kinderwagen.com is) we have other niche sites which partially sell the the same products. We made sure that every product is indexed only once, however it might still hurt the main site.

Does anyone have experience in a similar situation or advice what we could do?

Thanks in advance.

Dieter

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Just because you had your manual penalty lifted, doesn't mean the algo penalty (mainly penguin) was lifted as well. Be sure to check up on your anchor distribution to make sure it isn't over optimized.

That being said, we had a site in a similar scenario and ended up switching to another domain after a lack of results for a while. Depending on the extent of the negative SEO, it might be the easiest solution.