How important is it to get backlinks on blogs ONLY related to your niche?

[mc9320]

How important is it to get backlinks on blogs ONLY related to your niche?

I've been trying to find blogs related to my niche for the past couple of months using Google and SEOquake (to find those with good PR).
However, there are hardly any with more than a PR of 1 and those are almost always no-follow;I still comment on some no-follow links if I feel it will generate some traffic to my site.

Therefore, in Google's eyes is it ok for people to comment on blogs different from your niche? I know the obvious answer is if it was really bad then people could potentially kill off their competition by placing links this way, but will it generally look unnatural to Google and therefore hurt you in the SERPs

Thoughts?

[chrislu]

you not get targeted traffic in this case! try forums

[Juvv2096]

its not going to make or break your site. I honestly wouldnt bother, I never do and I am on page have page 1 rankings for about 5 different high competition niches.

[Barry Unruh]

Let's think about this logically and sensibly for a moment...

As an example, let us say you are running a high quality website which provides motivational resources for sales people, athletes, and dieters...

During your daily browsing for news you run across several highly interesting blogs or news reports which you have an opinion you wish to express. The pages happens to be a PR2, PR3....PR6...whatever. Those blogs happen to be about politics, a car wreck, drug abuse..whatever..

What are you going to put in that little box that asks for your website? I will with ZERO hesitation put my website in that box. Even if my website would be about digital cameras I would not hesitate.

The problem is you are thinking in terms of "SEO" instead of terms of sharing your thoughts and just sharing your business name as you do it. Which way is more fun, too?

[nicnac03]

NOT important at all. My testing and experience has shown me that relevancy doesn't matter at all when it comes to backlinking. Get a link wherever you can.

What DOES matter is the quality of the link. A quality link is a link that has a high PR, very few outbound links, on the main article and not in comments or signatures and is linked with your keyword in the anchor text.

[JSProjects]

A link is a link. Don't restrict yourself just because a link may be coming from an unrelated source. However, commenting on related blogs could potentially drive traffic from the comment itself if you're using good keywords in the "Name" field. (Some blogs only allow you to use your name, though.)