Blockspring is a Google Sheets add-on, which means you can set up data pulls from within your sheet.

First, install Blockspring from the “Add-ons” menu in a Google Sheet. Then, open it from the same menu and you’ll see a screen which looks like this:

I primarily use Blockspring for research, scraping and communication. In other words, any task which requires chaining more than one dataset together or sending messages out to my team.

An example is grabbing all links from a page (something I do all the time for SEO research). Search for “get links” in the Blockspring sidebar, and you’ll find this Block:

okdork-googlesheets-blockspringsetup-e1499099593270.png

Inserting it will automatically drop a list of links into your Google Sheet:

okdork-googlesheets-blockspring-results-e1499099653710.png

You can also set Blocks to refresh on a timer, without you opening or touching the Sheet. In other words, you can fire yourself from being a data jockey.

For a few API services (Blocks), you will need to first sign up for the service (sometimes as a developer) and get an API key.

Use Cases

Fore more experimenting, check out a few of my favourite Blockspring Blocks:-

a) SEO

Alchemy APISEO

Crawl and clean web pages, tag documents with their taxonomy categories, high-level concepts, or emotional sentiment. Extract named entities, rank keywords by relevance, image recognition, and more.

https://open.blockspring.com/tags/304-alchemy-api

AlexaSEO

Gather information about web sites, including historical web traffic data, contact information, related links and more.

https://open.blockspring.com/tags/302-alexa

News

SEOGet Recent News about Topic

https://open.blockspring.com/tags/85-news

SEMrush

SEOCompetitors in Organic Search

https://open.blockspring.com/tags/402-semrush

Wikipedia

SEOArticle's External Links