Top 5 Web Scraping Tips
If used well, web scraping can prove to be a life saver to many. With the help of web scraping, one can easily collect all the required data and parse it in a reusable manner. We understand how important and crucial it is for you to have accurate, reliable and up to date data. Therefore, it is vital for you to learn do's and don'ts before you scrape the data online. In this blog, we will talk about some of the tips that can help you in making the best use of scraping bot and web scraping services.
Respect the website: This is one of the first most tip that you need to know while scraping a website, that is, respect the website you are scraping. Before you scrape any website, read the robots.txt file to know what web pages you can and cannot scrape. Also, in some of the cases, you will find data related to the frequency that you are allowed to scrape the website. This way, you should respect the website by going through the file. If you don't respect the rules stated by the website owner, then you might end up in having your IP address blocked.
Identify when you've been blocked: Most of the websites don't appreciate the scraping process. Some of the websites have even develop anti scraping methods that block the IP address. Most of the times, you will get to know that you have been blocked as you will get a 403 error code. But, there are more malicious ways of blocking without the person being knowing it. You need to record the logs as to know how a certain website responded about being scraped.
Avoid being blocked again: When a regular user visits a website, generally, the website will go through the person's user agent. This includes details related to the browser, version, device and more. The visitors without a user agent are blocked as bots. So as to avoid being blocked again, you should update your user agent pool from time to time.
Use correct proxies: First thing that anti scraping systems will do is do look at your IP address. If you are detected, when you might end up in their IP blacklist. Thus, you need to use premium proxies that allows one to bypass any geographical location.
Build a web crawler: A scraping bot is a great way to associate with an API. The crawlers feed to the API to collect data. You can even set some rules to sort which URLs to scrape. This way, building a web crawler can help you!
If you are a business owner and looking for scraping services, Botscraper could be your long term marketing partner.
