gouri - 3:11 pm on May 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

In a word, yes - it "could". Have you received a WMT warning about tjpe backlinks?

I haven't received a message in WMT. Could I still be over optimizing?

Could changing the anchor text from a phrase to the url be an option or maybe not having a link in the forum signature?

Could either of these reduce the possible over optimization?

[edited by: gouri at 3:19 pm (utc) on May 8, 2012]