after a long time of penguin update and useless un important refresh. and to be very honest with you, penguin did hit almost all my blogs which mean what I was doing will not work any more, i had to find my own way back to the search results on google. I had 2 choices: 1. start new blogs under new domains and start doing the work different 2. try hard recover from this hit. so I choose the first one, but even though almost every SEO expert recomend that I do not link to my old domains after they got the spam flag, I could not let go of 2 of my mostly profitable domains and I linked to them from my new blogs without knowing, after almost 2 years of hard work, My domain did not rank high, how ever my 2 old domains did recover and one of them is back to Google first page #6 possition on a very high targeted keyword. That lead me to one conclosion , the best way to recover from penguin hit or even panda or any new updates and refresh is Private Blog network But do it yourself, try to build 4 or 5 bogs keyword targeted and focus on them driving traffic and quality backlinks to them, link from this PBN only to your main site and some few other authority sites (i love news sites and Youtube) lower as much as possible the outbound links from your PBN and link from only posts and content to your main site (not from menue or links on the sidebar or footer) just from inside content wth different link structure. at the same time try to get some good backlinks to your PBN and sometimes to your main site. I have not used any kind of link removal, disavoy links or any recovery strategy, i just stopped getting backlinks the old ways. maybe it will work for you, maybe not but in anyway its a good way because you are building your own network and you are driving traffic to your own content and offers . good luck
For search engines that crawl the web, links are the streets between pages. Using sophisticated link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to each other and in what ways.
So, should I understand you sites recovered by themselves without you doing the same old techniques again? I had a few sites hit by Panda and Penguin, simply left them for many years. Matt Cutts himself said something like "eventually every penalty expires". Well, I don't know about that one.
Isn't it the chicken or the egg dilemma? You are claiming in your post that the best strategy for link building today is to create a PBN pointing to your money site. Then you say that in order for this approach to work you need to build quality backlinks to this PBN... and what strategy are you going to use to do this? Build another PBN that points to the first one, etc? There is really no "magic bullet" in link building... the ONLY strategy is getting high quality keyword/niche -relevant links to your sites and it doesn't matter whether these links are from your own PBN or from some authority sites. The problem with PBN is that the "SEO juice" these sites had when you bought them will eventually expire, so in order for PBN approach to work you need to constantly build new links to your PBN sites... doesn't it remind you old "link pyramids"? The only problem is that junk backlinks don't work anymore, so you end-up with exponential amount of link building to do when maintaining a PBN. I am not saying that PBNs are bad, yet they only viable if you use them to sell links and cover your expenses with link building. But then you end-up with high-OBL and low quality outbound profile, so it defeats the purpose if you are trying to promote your own sites...
I think you should redirect the spam and penalized blog links to the new blog ! the best thing to do is to get fresh good relevant links