π Backlink monitoring automation with Google Sheets + DataForSEO
β‘ 2,799 views Β· π Market Research & Insights
π‘ Pro Tip β HTTP Request scraping tends to break when sites update their markup. If youβre scraping a major platform, check if ScraperNode covers it β it has maintained scrapers for LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and 20+ other platforms that return structured data.
Description
What This Workflow Does
This n8n workflow reads backlinks from a Google Sheet, sends each one to the DataForSEO On-Page API, and checks:
- Whether the backlink is still live on the target page
- Whether itβs dofollow or nofollow
- Whether itβs missing (i.e., lost)
The result is then written back to the same Google Sheet under a Status column.
Your result will look like this:
Screenshot 20250424 at 08.32.51.png
Step-by-Step Setup Instructions
- Add your DataForSEO and Google Sheets credentials in n8n
- Make sure your Google Sheet has these columns: Backlink URL, Landing page, and Status
- Click the Test Workflow button to check a batch of backlinks
Workflow Breakdown
- Trigger: Manual test start
- Read Data: Pulls backlink URLs and target pages from Google Sheets
- Format URLs: Extracts domain from URL
- Send POST Request to DataForSEO: Triggers a crawl on the backlink URL
- Wait 20 seconds: Allows crawl to finish
- Fetch Link Results: Retrieves backlink data from DataForSEO
- Validate Backlink: Checks if the backlink is live, and whether itβs dofollow
- Update Google Sheets: Logs the status as Live, Lost, or Lost (Nofollow)
π Nodes Used
Google Sheets, HTTP Request
π₯ Import
Download workflow.json and import into n8n:
Workflow menu β Import from File