For what could you get penalized? Over optimization - meaning you post your backlinks with same keyword a thousand times. Non-related category - for example you have site about marketing and you make some blog comments on some music blogs. And can you get penalized if you post your link to sites like this: http://e-turo.org/?q=node/57 (PR 5 dofollow)
quality backlink and theme based it's impressive for your website, but non related category and bulk links not useful for your website....
Both are part of Google Penguin Update which penalized websites having poor quality back links which means back links coming from several websites with same anchor text which shows all this link building has been done for improving search engine results for the website. It also includes placing web links in irrelevant categories with soul intent of increasing search engine results placement.