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Penalty can affect you in two ways: Manual Penalty Algorithmic Penalty (Automatic) Reconsideration request is useful for the first one, not the second. This means that if you have been algorithmically penalised you will need to remove the source of the problem and the issue will self-resolve. The problem is that Google will not ever tell you what you did wrong. Aint that a bitch! What may have happened in your case is two things: Your penalty is lifted and your rankings are where they are as you lack good natural links. You have removed manual penalty but the algorithmic one still lingers. Options? Clean up some more and wait a few weeks. Contingency plan? Dump the domain and move on if you can afford to do this from business point of view. Sometimes you can get away with 301 from A to B, however if you are a higher impact website you will not stay under a radar long. Best of luck mate. I feel your pain.

Late to the part with this but I just can't see G penalising a site because it has too many links from articles with the same anchor text. If that were the case we would see a lot of webmaters and SEOs arranging lots of those links to their competitors sites in order to de-rank them, thus leaving the way clear for their own sites.