Although many established voices in the field of Internet marketing have attempted to disprove this as misconception, the current direction in SEO still builds on the premise that the value of links is directly proportional to their level of relevance.
While the dispute addresses all types of links, it is backlinks which seem to have caught the SEO community's attention the most, settling into one of the main reasons for debate of late.
Willingly or not, the "link building-concerned" online community has been divided into two opinion groups.
One supports the idea that relevant backlinks are more powerful than their generic counterparts are, and therefore should be preferred in any link building campaign, while the other states otherwise.
Since there is little evidence to either confirm or contradict such suppositions - unless the magnates running the major search engines suddenly decide to break their vow of silence and share their site-ranking secrets with the public - the topic remains open for speculation and personal interpretation.
With little tangible proof to base our judgment upon, in order to decide whether relevant backlinks are indeed the better option, we have no other way but to rely on simple logic.
Even if you have no clue about Internet marketing, it seems a question of common sense that relevant links be more powerful, since they are capable to attract exactly what's needed for a healthy sales sector, specifically a dense targeted traffic.
Obviously, a visitor reading a page containing your backlink is more likely to follow it and check out your website if that link is related to the topic of the page the visitor is reading.
Going down this line, if the visitor is particularly interested in the content he/ she finds on your website, he/ she is more likely to be hooked into buying your products or services.
While all this seems to point towards relevant backlinks being nothing less than ideal for one's website, the truth is they involve one major drawback - unlike generic backlinks, highly relevant backlinks are more difficult to obtain.
If you are looking for good feasibility and ease of supply in your link building ventures, then it may be better to focus on regular, generic links in the first place.
Just think about it: with generic links you get to write about whatever you like, you have more freedom in choosing where to post your links, and you can speed up the process of link building significantly.
Moreover, since people link to other websites based on many criteria other than relevance (value of content, originality, freshness of information being only some of them), to overemphasize the aspect of relevancy would be a waste of your time.
Bluntly put, any functional link is a good asset if you want your site to climb up the engine's ladder, enjoy better prominence and attract more visitors.
And to an extent, factors like value of content, site quality and even site aspect can actually outweigh the element of relevance.
With that said, try not to overemphasize the necessity of relevant backlinks and consider aiming for a more balanced approach in your link building efforts.
This will not only allow you more freedom in terms of link generation options, but also help speed things up a little and make the process of building links somewhat easier.