Should I 301 a penalty recovered domain

Hi guys,
I need your help with something :

I used to run a games site with 10k searches easy comp a month an year ago . I was ranking #1 for 4 months and then i got lazy and stopped doing any seo on it and it dropped to #8. To fix it i bought sape links from a stupid service here. Their whole network was busted by google at the time of penguin 2.1 and i got message in wmt saying un natural links. I disavowed all the sape links and they accepted reconsideration request and my site was back and ranking on page 2 -3. But its been a year since then. I tried all possible seo tricks to get it back to page 1 but nothing is working considering this is a damn easy niche. It is like killing an ant with a nuclear weapon

So what i concluded is that the homepage will never rank coz i think even though they considered my request and ranked my site back they might have made some setting where my homepage will never rank again on top page

But to my surprise inner pages have now started to rank on page 1 but on #9 position where traffic is too less

So I Am now thinking to buy a fresh domain redirect the old domain. Do you think this will hurt guys. Since i think homepage is somewhat penalised although its ranking page 2 buy inner pages aren't penalised

So really confused whether to 301 it or not

Any suggestions will be highly appreciated

You can recover your rankings, the reason you are still ranking poorly even after having the penalty removed is likely because of the fact you still have bad links pointed to your domain. That means that you are now affected by Penguin and not the manual penalty.

You have two options: give up on the domain entirely, or finish the job with a link removal campaign.

301'ng that domain will pass the Penguin problems onto your new domain. I think you've done a good job getting the manual penalty removed so I would suggest finishing the job and the original domain.

It happened to me a year ago and im sure u can get back to your crown place, but only thing you need to do is remove those idiotic links pointed to your domain. Use some good service to do that job. 301 redirect may not help you in this case. get rid of those links and concentrate on some natural links and social media. That really Helps!!!!!

Thank you guys for your repsonses. I'll def try it out now

i think your site not panelized now it can reach on top position. and if your internal page ranking then try to put more work on that url.

and if after doing all thing you dont reach first page then redirect can help you.