Whitey - 5:27 am on Dec 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

@martinacastro - thanks for tabling those facts to center our thoughts better, c/o John Mu

Just a word of caution - I have seen one prominent business badly impacted in rankings caused by going too aggressively at removing links.

My personal recommendation is to cut slowly in a way that you can hopefully gauge / control your recovery as well as build compenasatory actions. That would take in a fairly lenghtly recovery for some folks who have done extensive link building.