Getting Traction with new site

[garbageaccount]

I started here in December and walked into a real SEO blunder. The company has an established web site with good PR and some descent rankings with http://www.bluedolphin.com yet the company decided to change the domain to http://www.bluedolphin-magazines.com and launched in August of last year. Unfortunately the SEO person before me never bothered to make sure the backlinks followed the new site, didn't really optimize the site well and used some pretty cheesy tricks to try to fool the spiders, which I believe may be part of the problem I'm having with Google.

Now the company also launched another site http://www.magazine-supermarket.com in September/October time frame. The problem being that except for some cosmetic differences in graphics the same seo nightmare was duplicated here.

I have since, removed all the seo tricks from the site, added meta-tags that made sense with the already keyword rich text the creative department has on the site, and begun asking the backlinking partners to change their links and to add the second site to their links.

Now here is my big worry, is the fact that magazine-supermarket.com has the same exact products and links going to penalize the site as a duplicate of bluedolphin-magazines even though the index page format and body text are completely different? The meta-tags are also different.

Is there anything more I can do to distinguish Magazine-Supermarket.com? Any suggestions would be helpful as the only place that this site is getting any ranking is on MSN.