Purchased two of the most highly reviewed Public Blog Networks on BHW recently, one month after the other. I was stuck at the bottom of page 1 to page 4 for some highly competitive, lucrative keywords. I was at a limit with how far I could push it with citations, 100% hand-written web 2.0s, video/image/audio, and my own niche targeted but low power PBNs.
Got hit by an unnatural links message in WMT last week after an initial spike in rankings. Not sure which one tripped it, but that REALLY sucked. I worked on that site for a year and had over 350k words of content. It was bringing in $300-600 a month with average main keyword rankings of ~#10-20.