Do do-follow backlinks from other countries really help my site?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Dominik Mikula: Yes
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  Travis Bailey: Yes, unless those links are somehow in violation of Webmaster Guidelines. And that`s assuming you`re interested in Google. Even the ones that violate it sometimes help, but I would generally discourage engaging in such practices.https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
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  Stockbridge Truslow: Authority isn`t really passed through any old link. And while some may wish to argue, I`m almost certain that "authority" is actually topic sensitive. (Meaning, that if your motor sports site has a high authority and you suddenly start talking about chewing gum flavors, Google isn`t going to just assume that you`re an authority on that subject as well). Keep in mind also - you gain more authority from who you choose to link to than by who chooses to link to you. The value of an inbound link varies by how many hops (links) there working backwards up toward the set of high authority seed sites. So a link coming from a page that doesn`t have any (or many) inbound links from other sites that have inbound links from other sites that have inbound links won`t pass much "link juice" (in the traditional sense of the word). PageRank is still a factor, of course, but the contextual value and distance between you and one of the seed authority sites for that context are much bigger. PageRank is just a "pure" rankability number. This stuff I`m talking about is a contextual rankability factor and it varies depending upon the subject of the search terms in play. In most cases, an inbound link of no value won`t really hurt things. It doesn`t have much juice to pass along, contextual or not. That said, if you have your motor sports site and you have a huge proportion of links from sites about bubble gum, that can be problematic because you are saying that your site is about motorsports, but everyone else is telling Google that it`s about gum. So, that might make it hard to rank for either. Country/physical location doesn`t really matter much (in most cases, anyway). And, in fact, even no-follow links have certain value so long as Google is aware of both ends of the wormhole. (If a little side street connects Main and Elm Streets - you don`t necessarily need to ever go down that side street to know that Main and Elm Streets are connected somehow. )
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  Michael Martinez: "Authority" is a word Web marketers would do well to forget. If people from other countries are linking to your site without incentive, leave the links alone unless a search engine tells you they are harmful. Links are good for creating visibility (to people), sending you non-search referral visitors, and sometimes for SEO. You`ll never really know when links help for SEO. You can usually see the results when they help in other ways.
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  Dave Elliott: Google will probably ignore them if they don`t provide value. Unless you are actively trying to obtain links from poor sites or have recently had a manual penalty I wouldn`t care about having links from weird places. Its the internet. The internet is weird.
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  Jobin John: Last year I was creating backlinks for a client and used Ahrefs to check on his competitor`s backlinks to my surprise the top ranking site had a lot of high DA dofollow links from Russia, I was confused so checked on the linking sites, they belonged to the same niche, had a 0 toxic and spam score. The site layout and content looked genuine so, I created links on these sites for my client and found more similar sites. After approx. a month or so I saw a boost in rankings. I am not sure if it still works as Google changes itself on a regular basis but yeah it did work.