Is there a chance I could get banned from google if I link to many different forum signatures. I have already purchased a signature from this site. My website is a forum, so it may recognise the similarity. The website is long term and DIY related and I don't want to screw it up by getting banned. Cheers in advanced people for your future advice.
no buying sig links doesn't get you banned but having a lot of links in short period does so be careful.
You will not get banned for buying signature links, signature links will help you to improve your placement in the serps.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. I think the only problem you would have is an automated system. Buying signature links is more of a manual thing. You might be getting a lot of links on the list, but they are all from they same source. It is kind of like being linked by a huge website with thousands of pages. If you are sitewide, you'll have tons of backlinks from it, but Google won't ban you for that. I've never heard of anyone getting banned for signature links.
Of course you won't get banned for building backlinks via signature links. Isn't it logical? Google won't ban you for something you can't fully control (external factors like sites linking to your site).
signature links will not get you banned and you can have as many sig links as you want. however, how beneficial the sig links are is the question.
Bad neighborhood linking won't get you banned, google is not stupid enough to do that. If that was true then all we have to do to get someone banned is throw up lots of links to their site in bad neighborhoods.... Linking to bad neighborhoods won't help much increase your PR or other factors, but it won't get you banned. Think logically like a bot, a link does not have any identifier to tell the bot who left it there, so a bot cannot tell if you left the link there, or if someone else left the link there.
Your are correct there. If that were true then we could all get our competitors websites banned and then within a short time there would only be a small amount of sites in Googles entire index.