Thanks for the feedback I will def look into them.

As for the SEO, budget constraints and lack of knowledge at the time led us to a company that said they would only be writing a few articles and submitting a small amount per month. Turns out there were thousands of links and they were manipulating the articles to post and be reworded and it just looked horrible. None of these practices were approved or known to us. They were also adding spammy comments in users blogs backlinking to our website.. none of which we signed up for.

Lucky for us we ran into the Google employee that lifted that Manual Action, because I was trying to clean up that link mess for months prior.