A very interesting tool to use for monitoring all of the backlinks coming into your website or blog is Backlink Watch. The great thing about Backlink Watch is that it not only shows you where your links are coming from but also displays each site’s PageRank as well as whether the link is do-follow or no-follow.

Whether a link is do-follow or no-follow is becoming more and more important as Google begins penalizing sites that sell paid links with the do-follow tag. Do-follow will transfer PageRank to the linked site, links with the no-follow tag do not transfer any link juice.

Google is trying so hard to penalize sites that sell paid d0-follow links that they are also inadvertantly penalizing sites like ProBlogger who don’t sell links, but based on the search I did on Shaun Carter dot Com with Backlink Watch – ProBlogger has do-follow activated comments so that may be the reason for a penalty.

This blog has 453 backlinks at the moment and uses the default WordPress no-follow tag for comments. However I do like to write about some interesting blogs that happen to link to me for one reason or another and in all the posts I write the links are do-follow.

[tags]google, do-follow, no-follow, pagerank, pr, link juice, comments, problogger, shaun carter, backlinks, wordpress, backlink watch[/tags]