Here is an update after the recent Google sledgehammer on PBNs and money sites using them to rank & bank.
Out of the 30 sites and 2 money sites, both the money sites are safe and holding the rankings except that it keeps moving up and down few spots everyday and that is due to the current niche volatility, i assume.
Out of the 30 PBNs that were all ranking nice and enough to generate hordes of traffic since last 4-5 months, during the last week of February when google went behind PBNs, 2 of them got hit and that too i turned them around in the last 25 days or so. They are back at their rankings, you may ask why. Well, search over this forum and you will find the answer. From what i read everywhere and here on this forum is that Google was targeting anchor keyword targeting. So i diluted the anchors from those PBNs and just used brand/URL from them to the money site. Though this was applicable to release the penalty on money sites, i went ahead and changed the linking out from these PBNs to brand/URL and it worked. This also confirms that these were algo penalties and no manual reviews as when it was corrected the algo also corrected the rankings after recrawling. Now there is an important question that is lingering in my mind, why was this penalty not applied to other 28 sites where the linking out pattern is more or less similar. No answer from me as of now till i find a definite pattern, right now i don't see any penalty.
Surprisingly, even though two PBNs stopped sending traffic for almost 30 days, but the last 30 days have seen a huge rise in traffic. I attribute this mainly to the factor that there were at least 4 sites in my niche those which were holding spots in first page of google that were hit during last google update and are no where to be seen, some crappy sites have taken over those spots and traffic has increased to my sites. But this would be temporary as and when webmasters hit back.