Backlink Monitoring Automation with Google Sheets + DataForSEO

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 it's dofollow or nofollow
Whether it's 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:

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 it’s dofollow
Update Google Sheets: Logs the status as Live, Lost, or Lost (Nofollow)