Linking sites - have to be of similar theme?

[Jon12345]

If I have a website on topic X and I get lots of links from sites with topic Y, will this still help my rankings? Or, should I ONLY go for links which are very closely related content wise?

Jon

[coconutz]

If I have a website on topic X and I get lots of links from sites with topic Y, will this still help my rankings?

Yes, off topic links can help with your Page Rank and rankings.

Or, should I ONLY go for links which are very closely related content wise?

Closely related links will probably have more benefit as far as delivering quality traffic to your site. If I had a choice I would take the related links for this reason.

Here's some other discussions on reciprocal linking:

Linking Outside the Box [webmasterworld.com]

Linking – What’s the big deal? [webmasterworld.com]

Prompting sites to reciprocate links [webmasterworld.com]

[aerosmith]

Jon
Non related topics can probably help you with your rankings , but getting targetted traffic is the key. If people just enter your site even just for curiosity but does not stick to your site there is no real benefit .
related links would get you less traffic maybe , but the qualitative visitors would be more as we all know the 80:20 rule in marketing. 20% of your visitors contribute to 80% of your business

[Jon12345]

My question was really about Google rankings and not traffic generated from the link itself.