5 Challenges of SERP Scraping

Search Engine Result Page or SERP scraping has literally become a hot talk now days as demand for data is increasing at a rapid speed. Now, more and more people are trying out to extract the data from multiple websites so that it can help them in making smart business decisions to take it to great heights. However, a number of challenges occur which act as an obstacle in the way of generating good amount of data.

So, in this blog, we are going to talk about the challenges that come in the way of SERP scraping. Let's look them in detail.

• Bot access: The first and the foremost thing you need to check is the thing that your targeted website is allowing the procedure of scraping to be conducted. If you found out that it is disallowing for the scraping purposes, then you need to ask the website owner to grant permission. For that, you may be required to explain the needs and requirements for the scraping. If in case, the website owner disagrees, then you need to find the next best alternative website that contains same kind of information.
• Dynamic content: It has been seen that most of the websites apply AJAX so as to update the dynamic website content. Examples of AJAX is late loading images, a number of scrolls altogether and more. It could be considered convenient for the users to view more relevant data but it is not considered relevant for the scrapers.
• Complicated website page structures: Most of the website pages are based on HTML. The web page designers have their own standards for designing the web pages and therefore the webpage structures are different from one another. In addition to this, the websites update their content so as to improve their User experience also for adding new features on to the website which leads to structural changes on the web pages. As the web scrappers are set up according to a particular design, so they do not work on the updated page.
• Login requirement: Most of the times, it is required from the side of web owner to log in first. After you have submitted your login credentials, the browser will automatically adjust according to the request you make. This is one of the challenges that the scrapers face and be sure that the cookies that have been sent to you is with the requests as well.
• Slow load speed: Often times, websites act slowly and even fail to load as when they receive a number of requests altogether. With the case of humans, they just reload the page and wait for the website to respond. But SERP Scraper doesn't know how to deal with this situation and this is one of the biggest challenges that they face.