Link Quality - do links need to be from the same industry?

[spinrecovery]

My first post. Sorry if its in the wrong section.

I am involved in < a certain > industry. I have many requests for link exchanges, but many of these are from non-related sites. While these are popular sites, does having inbound and outbound links to sites not within my industry hurt my Google rankings?

<Removed unneeded specifics.
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[edited by: tedster at 5:12 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2007]

[Simsi]

My understanding of this is that inbound links from sites, irrespective of the industry, can't actually harm your ranking. If they could, you would be vulnerable to hostile approaches. Although the less relevant the site linking in (or page content thereof), the less weight that link has, possibly as little as zero I would guess.

Outbound links however could harm you if you are going totally off-topic, unless perhaps you have well written sub-pages on that topic within your main site - perhaps. A link to a bad site, a banner farm or a site with no useful content might indicate to G! that you are not concentrating on what your users want, or at worst are exercising bad quality control, which let's face it is not what they want at the top of their SERPS. Hopefully ;-)

Some sites are generic (ie: free stats counter sites etc) but do well from tens of thousands of potentially "off topic" sites linking to them by displaying the counter. But I reckon each link probably only helps 0.0000001 of a relative "point" so it would take stacks to make a noticable difference IMO.

[spinrecovery]

Many thanks, very helpful.