How much does google care about backlinks being relative?

[outwest]

I know we all talk about anchor text of the backlinks, PR of the backlinks being important

but how important (if at all) is the backlinks coming from sites that related to that niche?

If you have a Sporting goods store
and it is backlinked by a PR5 Car Parts website, or Mental health blog etc

Does google give a hit to your link relativity, ? and say hmmm thats not a related niche backlink so I will knock down the juice of that backlink

[paulgl]

Some relevance is easy to determine, some is hard.

What we call relevant, may not be as relevant to google.

It's comes in many forms, like context of the sentence
and article, to the niche of the whole site.

I don't care much for relevance, but I do like authority.

I like links that are contextual and high up on the page.

I know that the WF has very high authority, so any link in
a sig carries some weight just on the sheer authority. If
relevance really mattered as much as people think it did,
then the sig links here would be trash.

All links are votes. I am one who does not believe that google
takes in relevance of the whole domain(site) as much as
the authority of the site, and, context of the link.

Sometime in the past, people swore Matt Cutts was ranking
for viagra just because he mentioned it in a post. Exactly.

Dburk has always given a good spin on "relevance" and what
we think is relevant may not be to google.

It's also why amazon, ebay, craigslist, wikipedia, etc. rank for a ton
of terms. Sheer authority.

Paul