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Dr. Pete did a great post about just this topic (same exact title for the blog post even) at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Andrew, to answer your question in simple words, yes...aged links help. Now, the way I am looking at it, there's also this bigger problem. Imagine scenarios below. Website A.com has 10,000 natural links. You add 50 Rented Links. Now, 1 year later, "naturally" your natural links should grow. Also, with the nature of the Internet, some of those 10,000 links will be lost...sites expire...people loose interest in their websites/blogs, clean-up efforts and other reasons. So gradually you are both gaining and loosing links on a regular basis, which is natural. So if the 50 rented, essentially 50 anchor text links are gained and lost after 12 months or so, they give a clean indication of something going on. The risk is there...on a scale of 1-10 of affecting your link profile, the risk maybe 3-4. Imagine the above scenario for Website B, which only has 100 total natural links. And you add 50 Rented Links and those links disappear after 1 year...that's a much higher risk compared to the above scenario. The risk in both situations is 2 fold. A. Loss of PA/DA B. Potential Issues with Link Profile. Does that make sense ? I hope this helps you make decisions.

Thanks for your response. You make some interesting points regarding your competitors ranking despite the Dupe content. Really appreciate your input, Regards Aran

Hi Aran, Some of the links are gone from this latest crawl, more will be gone in November, and they should be almost all gone by December. See Rand's post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/november-2011-linkscape-update. As I noted in the September index update, we have had some serious issues when crawling deeper on large domains and encountering binary files that contain code our crawler recognizes and treats as a link. To help stop this problem, we applied a black list to this index to stop a large number of the files folks had reported to us (our estimate is that ~40% of binary files are now removed). However, we know there's still more than a few of these in the database of links so we'll continue cranking away on solutions to remove them all. Our hope is to have them reduced in the next index (November) and nearly eliminated by the December index. If you're ever curious about the next/previous updates, you can always see data for them on our Linkscape calendar.

I think it depends on your business, but it's not just about promoting yourself and posting endless tweets etc. - you need to build relationships and target the right people - get involved, help people out, comment on how you enjoyed something they posted, if you genuinely did, and if it's relevant to your market. If you just post everything from your sites to your StumbleUpon profile, for example, why would anyone follow you? If you post other interesting content that's relevant to your websites, with occasional posts to the best content on your websites, then I reckon that's a better tactic.

Keep in mind that PageRank is based soly on the backlinks pointing to your site. Having a "nice site" won't directly influence PageRank in any way. Also, PageRank is only 1 of many Google ranking factors...I recommend that you not pay too much attention to it.

I'm talking about having the +1 button on pages of your website - e.g. product pages (info here). If there have been a number of people +1 a particular product then that may help the position of that page organically - I think even if you aren't signed in. You wouldn't +1 at the SERP stage if you haven't been on the site but your friends might have done which could input into it. All guesses though

Thats why I ask on SEOmoz, a sensible answer with sensible advice that can be easily put into action. This had crossed my mind, however I've been staring at the woods so long, I couldn't see the trees! Thanks EGOL.