can bad incoming links added in comments effect my page rank

Hi, My name is Joseph and i have a blog, i have been recieving a
reasonable amount of comments on my blog (About 4 per day) which is
powered by wordpress. Many of the comments i have been recieving have
first ended up in the spam box but actually seem to be genuine and the
person who has added the comments seems to have read the content of my
post before adding the comment (i have no idea if these comments have
been posted by some black hat backlink software )so i have marked them
as none spam and then approved the favourable comments. The majority
of the comments have come from other blogers who are obviously
attracted to backlinking to my site which as far as i am aware is
fine, i am also under the (may nieve) impression that comments are
counted as possitive votes.

I have noticed that i have dropped considerably in the page rank in
google for my previously successful key words which is rather
perplexing as i have not done any considerable work to gain backlinks
to my site. Basically with a few links to ezine articles and some web
2.0 sites my site rose well in about 3 months, i have however recently
added a very few comments onto some of the related sites that had
added comments onto mine.

I am concerned that if i have in advertently been dragged down due to
the low rank of the sites i have linked to or/and are linked to mine,
if this may be the case are there any tools available that i can
quickly check the rank and status of the sites linking in bound and
those i am interested to backlink to so as to not detrimentally
effect my own page status.

Just to finish i want to add that 90% of my posts have been written by
myself, only a couple i have added from other sites (with their
backlink and permission) that seemed to add value to my readers.

Thank you for your time.

Kind Regards.

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