What you are refering to is I'm guessing global authorities such as newspapers etc. Now whilst these links will not be viewed as spammy and will only serve as a benefit at the lower end of the scale relevency becomes more of an issue. Added to which whatever this sort of site mentioned you in would most likely be relevent otherwise a high quality site wouldn't mention you.
There are legitimate reasons for a website to link to an unrelated site, so they do pass value imo and completely agree with what simpseo said.
it will still be a backlink though. infact why are we putting our signature links in DP when some of us has travel sites.
I disagree with so many here. Links from any sites, help. Relevant links are best but links from a site that's unrelated to your niche still helps. Every little bit helps.
I think inexperienced people on this blog, misguide people, irrelevant links are not bad unless there spam content related, they still help build links and help increase website traffic, but the referral visitor time will be very low once they cant find what they where coming there for they will leave, usually 5-10 seconds, and it doesn't decrease website position i know i been working with SEO for 3 years now i own 21 blog, and 14 social bookmarking website. all of the social bookmarking website i own has over 1000 irrelevant link and i still manage to get 10-20 signups a day on each social bookmarking website, and only irrelevant links tht are not good are the ones that are already not listed in search engines or alexa. but any backlink to your site, and not links you left in a comment, can increase website traffic and page rank. and one other thing, why do people post if they don't fully understand the concept of seo.
I do a lot of linkbuilding and link testing with my business. We track back on a lot of things. Getting a link on a PR5 site with no relevance is better than a link on a PR1 site with 100% relevance.
unrelevant sites with high PR will give a good boost, maybe better than relevant sites with little or no PR.
Don't believe the hype... they DO help! When it the Monica Lewinsky thing came out, millions of websites linked to the story, very few of them were related... do you think google penalized them? How about when millions of sites linked to the OJ trial? Or Tiger Woods recently? The key is to mix it up... get relevant links too.
Link relevancy is important but its not the be all and end all. Check big G for Terry Kyle - he has an excellent set of experiments going on that pretty much seems to prove that link relevancy is not as important as many people would have you believe.
I've seen plenty of sites ranking well with links from lots of unrelated sites. Also, how many web design company websites have good rankings do you see from having a link at the bottom of their client sites, which are not relevants to web design, back to their own site?
I think its best to get 1 backlink from relevant website rather getting 100 backlinks from unrelevant websites.