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Depends on the price, if it is affordable you should buy it and work on it to get the reputation back, even if it takes time.

If you want to make visits ASAP, I wouldn't recommend to buy a banned domain.

Hi Jason,

With infos from the latest slideshare of Ian Howells, http://slideshare.net/ianhowells/life-after-penguin, I think some of these links are devaluated, and some are penalizing the site. You may remove them and confess to Google, or start on a new domain, or maybe use a new URL for every page, including the homepage.

This is a though question, penguin recovery is still an unknown process and nothing is guaranteed.

About content re-use, Howells did put the same content on another page, without 301 and it worked. Maybe you can put 404 or remove the content and put it on a fresh domain.

Hi Rolf,

Making 2 - 5 whitelabel shops target to the exact same market is a bad idea. You should at least target different niches or users.

Anyway if you plan on doing replicas of the site, you will have to change every texts on the different sites. I recommend to change the HTML and everything that could link the different sites.

This is a difficult task however, SERP domination is extremely hard.

Partial duplicate content can be OK if you provide your own product description. The main problem is writing a product description containing useful, unique content that is not already in the manufacturer's description.

If you have the budget to make these useful descriptions, do it and remove the manufacturer content.

Thanks for your answers, I think the first has more importance for Google, as it is for the user. Too bad the study can't be found anymore !