Do you mind sharing your penguin recovery success story?

uh, anyone?

One of the main things you want to focus on is making sure your anchor text is widely varied. This is what slapped most people.

I would advise to make sure the brand name and the url itself have more backlinks than any other keyword.

Of course, outbound links should only be to relevant sites, ideally authoritative ones.

I guess there was no need to move away from HTML and shift to blog because there was nothing wrong with your web structure, as you have stated, it had been doing pretty well for a rather long time before getting hit by the recent wave of algorithm changes. One smart move you have done is definitely about omitting all those outgoing links because who knows, maybe you had linked to some bad neighborhoods and suspicious websites. Take a second look at your web indexing records also.

Sometimes when rankings drop, so will the number of previously indexed pages. If you have been constantly adding fresh content pages to your website but they have not been indexed by Google, maybe there is something wrong. In some cases using too many links from one single source might be the cause, you know, tons of links with the same anchors may cause problems. I still believe a sudden change in your whole web structure was not needed, take a look at tittles to make sure they are the same as the older ones that Google had previously indexed.

I have recovered quite well from the panda.

A fresh re design and lots of good content along with dropping the amount of external links to affiliated products and of course I made it look like I was not selling something :-)

I built my new site to help the user and to answer the questions they may have :-) I made it look like a gave a damn about the site.

Mine had manual action though and was manually removed by one of google's lovely team members :-)

Danny