Users like to keep proxies turned on for a variety of reasons. It can help with the bandwidth. It can help surpass blanket IP bans in some cases. Some businesses consider using proxies as a must for web scraping. But some websites block web scraping using proxies. Before checking why websites block proxies or how to prevent getting web scraping blocked, let us see what web scraping
What is web scraping?
The process of extracting data from a website is called web scraping. After extraction, the user converts it into a suitable format, such as a spreadsheet or API. Web scraping can be performed either manually or using automated tools. Today, most businesses employ automated tools for web scraping. These tools can extract the specific information that the user has requested and organize it in a useful format – a CSV file, an Excel file, or JSON format.
What is web scraping used for?
Web scraping plays an important role in some businesses. Now that we have seen web scraping let us explore the various places where it is used.
- A business can scrape data from e-commerce websites to analyze how its competitors are performing.
- Scraping financial data can help in analyzing or researching market trends.
- When a business is migrating to a new site, it may scrape site data before migration.
- Some businesses use web scraping for lead generation.
- Bettors perform web scraping on sports websites to get stats and other information.
Thus, there are many places where website scraping is useful.
How is web scraping detected?
Websites targeted by web scraping tools have some techniques to identify if their data is being scraped. Most websites have a system to maintain a log of the IPs that access the website. Websites also analyze these IP addresses.
If a website finds that the rate of requests generated from a single IP address is greater than what a human can generally accomplish, it will further analyze the IP address. Websites have access to a list of proxy servers. They can compare the IP address with those on the proxy server list to detect web scraping. If the IPs have the same subnet blocking range, the website may either block the IP address, provide misleading information or suppress the IP’s request rate.
How to Prevent being detected?
If a business gets blacklisted or blocked by a website, it can no longer perform web scraping. So, it is essential to be aware of ways to prevent web scraping proxy.
- One way to prevent the target website from detecting the proxy IP is by reducing requests per second. It will minimize the chances of the IP address showing up with a high number of requests. But this action will bring down the crawling speed.
- Another solution is to rotate the requests to a set of residential IPs so that the website cannot detect the proxy server. As there is no subnet block range in residential IPs, one can successfully prevent getting detected or blocked.
Tools of web scraping
There are many web scraping tools in the market. Some are better than others. Here are some of the top web scraping tools.
- io – Several businesses use this tool as it employs cutting-edge technology. It is an easy web scraping tool.
- io – works without download and allows saving the collected data on cloud platforms.
Apart from the above, some of the best web data scraping tools include ScrapingHub, ParseHub, 80legs, and Scraper.
