"I'm going to disagree with Gary" Disagree with what? At no point did I say it was not possible to recover, I have in many post before cited that John Mueller has always said EVERY site is recoverable. Here is a link to one of those statements by John (View Question 4)
http://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/google-hangouts/12-April-2013.php?#Q4
I said "You will almost always have some suppression if you are unable to remove bad links." This Is a FACT!
It IS possible to split an arrow in half with another arrow from 100 yards but its near impossible. It is all in the wording with John and Matt, just because something is possible does not make it near impossible. I have done extensive testing on this as have you considering you have a business in this field. What is a FACT is that even if you recover you will almost always have some suppression from bad links even if you RANK #1 you could still be suffering from suppression that would give you a bigger gap between 1st and 2nd.
Recovery WILL take a very long time in most cases. The question is how long and how much time and money are you willing to invest in making this happen. The money invested can also be calculated in the loss of revenue you have every day until you do recover not just the money spent trying to fix the issue.
The cost spiral out of control when you take 6 months for example as a recovery time.
Here are the facts!
I have also had an answer on a similar topic about one great site is better than 10 semi ok sites.
1 site is better according to Google and done correctly will do great, however! Currently in many niches most of the top 10 have suppression or even a penalty and are still ranking top 10 because the whole industry is pulling dirty seo tricks. This has lead to many companies owning multiple sites as backups and because they are clean domains they are ranking up top for them. Google is unable to deal with this problem even when I report them direct to John Mueller. I know sites that have 4 sites in the top 10 listings. They make the whois private and have different contact details for each business and even if you call them they answer in the name of the domain using a simple phone number screening system.
For the last 10 years it has been more advantageous to do the things Google says do not do because you will spend all your time chasing the top 5 which will rotate and change like the wind as the churn and burn sites dominate most SME niches.Should you focus on one domain, YES because trying to do more is a real pain and putting your focus into one will yield better results. Can you protect yourself from future penalties? If you happen to make a mistake then you have no backup and you are back to square one. This is why most SME's have a backup domain or two because of the risk factor a totally ridiculous situation that Google has created because of long recovery times.
I also thought about going with an EMD as so many sites I see have he keywords in the name, so I figured to try that route too.
Another ridiculous situation, there are many issues with EMD, Google on multiple occasions have said the EMD's are bad at some point there will be a big slap on them I am sure! And all your hard work will be flushed down the toilet at the click a of button.HOWEVER! They are taking all the top rankings right now in most niches (excluding the major ones). Another reason why the churn and burn spammer community are winning again.The stumbling block Google hit last year when trying to slap these sites was that a few companies in Florida I believe said "HEY, we have been in business before the internet and called ourselves lawyers of Miami" or something like that. Matt Cutts was uable to argue the case that they did not do it because of SEO, lol and the algo was changed very very quickly.So the answer is, if you are going to use an EMD beware that you are in the firing line for a penalty in the near future. One of the main reasons is that if you want people to link to you using your company name you will basically be getting keyword rich links to your site and the Penguin Algo is looking for exactly that!Your best option is to start a fresh domain, use one of your keywords matched with a unique brand word so that you get some benefit of a keyword without being an EMD. Write new content and see how you rank.You could even keep the old domain up and remove the contact details from that site is there is no issues with the same address and keep working on it in the hope someday you will manage to recover it.
I don't like the answer I have to give you to your questions, but I have been online since 1993 and have been in the website building/SEO/SEM game since about 1997. I have seen it all, I have seen every lie, every bend of the truth and tested almost every example of what we have seen up to this date.Just because something is said as fact does not make it feasible choice. One last example of that was Google said negative SEO was not possible. They then changed their statement six months later to say it was possible but in extreme circumstances.
The real fact of the matter is it IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE. The ONLY time where it is possible is when the domain does not have a single link in it's profile previous to the incident that could be considered spammy, which in itself is almost impossible.Its all in the wording. Sorry to be a downer but its better to give hard truths than false hopes. There are few stories of recovery because they require to much time/money/work when compared with starting a new domain.
If you want a good shot at recovering Marie Haynes is and expert in the field and has tremendous experience, if you stand any hope of recovering it is with her.I hope your decision proves to be the right one now that you are armed with lots of knowledge