301 to fix a manual penalty (with tweaks to site code)

I know has been asked before, and the general consensus on the forum seems to be that while a 301 redirect from a penalized site to a new domain will fix the issue temporarily, it only seems to last for up to a week.

However, I was wondering what if you tweaked the content, site structure a bit and also used a different webpage template and also removed anything Google could use to identify you such as analytics,webmaster tools etc... could you use this as a better fix for a manual penalty?

Bit of background on my site: It has been ranking in the top 3 for the main keyterms while at the same time bringing in a good amount of traffic from long-tail. Then a few weeks back, something must have triggered an algorithmic penalty because it dropped to the bottom of 1st page for many of the terms while at the same time still ranking 1st for the long-tail. Then during the weekend, it just dropped out of the top 100 and now ranks 2nd for it's own name.

If anyone has any thoughts on this that would be great!

I don't know if it would help, but you could sell or transfer your domain to someone other than who it's registered for, and change the server it's on (as well as doing what you described above), to change your footprint, making Google think that it has a new owner. Google is a domain registrar, not to register domains, but to get access to your whois info.

Thanks for that photoman. Yeah, I've read of that technique used on the boards. I haven't heard of any "case studies" of it working yet though. If anyone has any experiences with that working please share!