We are a training provider and there aren't many blogs, forums or directories related to our niche, well not many that I am aware of. I was wondering if back links from other forums or blogs will carry any weight in my search engine ranking?
Well that's the thing, there is only one forum related to what we do and I have around 30 links coming from it. No specific blogs nor specific categories in directories either. Although, I have submitted my website in various directories under Education and I am sure it will help but the concern was getting penalized by Google for links from websites that are not related to us.
just touching on this topic its make sense to get links from the same niche for relevancy. however i dont believe there is any proof out there that a relevant link carries more weight than a non-relevant link. honestly i would just build links and not worry about the relevancy.
You could write articles related to your niche and submit them to article directories to get relevant links, but sounds as if you might have trouble finding the right categories for them so the distribution would be limited. Relevant links from relevant sites would hold more weight, but non-relevant links wouldn't be bad just less good , or it would be to easy to sabotage the competition.
I have never had an issue with building links that were from sites unrelated to my niche (otherwise sigs on digitalpoint would be useless), the only link building activity that has ever hurt me was sharing links with crappy blackhat sites.
It is very unlikely that links from unrelated sites can hurt you. Otherwise, your competitors could harm you by bombing your website with tons of unrelated links. The search engines are smarter than that.
as long as you stay away from spammy link farm type of links you should be ok and if you can't find blogs or forums related to your site why not write articles and get links from article sites instead? google likes relevant links from the top article sites.