A post to everyone complaining in this thread. How long ago was it since BMR (build my rank) was hit? I'll help you out -- about one year and 8 months ago. That's a long time in SEO-years.
If you're buying links from a public blog service -- there are risks involved. These are known risks that every top SEO blogger in the industry has commented on, and there have been dozens of threads on BHW about it. To make a complaint about your own personal site getting hit: I have empathy for your loss, but come on. You sound like you went to the casino and put it all on black and you're crying now because you thought you were guaranteed a win.
On a much more broad level, everything suggested on BHW would get your website personal scrutiny from Google. Some good advice is to build a free blog network out of web2.0s ... but if you showed Matt Cutts your site and showed off your 50 web2.0s that you built yourself -- he would tell you that those links are worthless, because you are simply vouching for yourself. All backlinks should be someone else vouching for you. His opinion is that your backlink portfolio should be devalued because of it, and you would suffer the same smackdown that any user of this blog service might be receiving.
The only reason Google makes public displays like this is because these types of links from blog networks are strong. I have absolutely no doubt that any action Google has taken towards this network has been manual. Right now Google trolls are trying to get members to divulge which sites they were getting links from, because they most likely only got a portion of the network.
Its the same Google does with buying links -- every once in a while they do a very public crackdown, because there's no way they can do this by algorithm. There's no way they can take down blog networks by algorithm.
Blog network links are very powerful -- and if you have a churn and burn site, use them directly. If you have an authority site that you're building and you want to use blog network links from a public blog network, then just link to a tier 1 instead of directly to your money site. There's no way Google can penalize you that way.
If the owner wants, they can regroup themselves, isolate penalized websites, identify weasels, move their operation to a different host, rename themselves and they're good to go. I'd have no qualms using them to a tier 1, and neither should anyone else.
In summary, if you like to gamble then direct link from public blog networks. If you don't like to gamble, link to web2.0s from public blog networks (still very powerful). If you're complaining that you didn't know there were any risks, you've been intentionally ducking your head in the sand.
@bluematter, my condolences that Google randomly picked your network. I recommend you keep up with it, regroup, rename the network, take your best customers with you and start anew -- blog networks are here to stay. Good luck.
