Blog Network: Slap? Need Opinion from Experts

A site of mine got slapped hard this year and was penalized for exactly 6 months. This happened because i did really stupid stuff back then like hiring someone who did a crazy link blast (forum profiles).

Otherwise i do only very mild "supporting" link building like submitting to blog networks once a week.

So the site came back in October and i was glad that it was out from the penalty. (By the way its an established site some years old)

I had one unrelated site of mine in the network to have credit for submissions. Recently, they (Google) seemed to have gone on a binge again and de-indexed about 30% of the blogs in this relatively known blog network.

My (unrelated) site was one of them which got deindexed.

This is not really a problem, the problem is rather that the old site which just came back from penalty not even months ago AGAIN just got penalized hard.

I did not do any blasts or anything but instead barely touched the site. I just had the "usual" article in this and another network which, in terms of link amount/volume is rather insignificant. (Network 1 creates maybe 10 links/week and the other network creates like 20 a month...)

My question is whether the fact that i had one site being part of the blog network getting de-indexed has also effected my other site negatively, up to the point that it got a serious penalization - or whether the fact that i had an article or two in two blog networks linking to this site got it penalized? (Which i basically did already for years and never had a problem with this, to the contrary actually).

Or that the sudden de-valuation of a bunch of links in the network(s) due to Google radical de-indexing migth just have downranked my site that hard?

I am wondering whether other people experienced the same thing. I am just really ***** right now seeing that the site got slapped so hard again but somewhat at a loss why...