The importance of data today has become an indisputable issue for businesses. Businesses or applications need data for many reasons. The information provided by the data is analyzed and opens the door to businesses and applications on many strategic issues.
Thanks to technological developments, it has become easier to access data day by day. Previously, there were not many methods used to obtain data. Either the data was purchased or the desired data was collected manually. Nowadays the concept of web scraping has been born which will eliminate these troublesome ways. With web scraping, applications are able to extract the data they want from target websites faster than a human can.
The main reason why web scraping is so popular today is that scraping can be automated. This means regularly obtaining data from target websites without any interruption.
Many websites have embedded technologies on their websites to detect some web scraping bots to avoid scraping. This may cause the application you use in web scraping to be blocked by the target website and blacklisted. In this article, we will talk about how we do our web scraping without being blocked or blacklisted by target websites.
1. Using a proxy server
A proxy is basically a server that acts as an intermediary between two networks. The idea behind having this intermediary server is to create a structure in the traffic of complex and distributed networks. A proxy server can centralize, organize, modify, and clean requests and responses between your computer and Internet services.
Using a proxy in your web scraping applications will prevent blocking while scraping target websites. The use of public proxies increases the risk of being blocked, so it is very important to use your own proxy servers in your web scraping applications.
Especially with proxy servers that you can configure location, it allows you to overcome all geographical restrictions. You will have the opportunity to easily scrape location-specific content without any obstacles.
2. IP Rotation
After the use and configuration of the web scraping proxy, the most important issue is the IP rotation process. Why is IP rotation so important? Teams monitoring the traffic of target websites may detect too many requests coming from the same IP address and find this suspicious. In this case, they can detect that this IP address, which makes too many requests, is a bot, and first blacklist it and then block it. After these actions, you may not be able to access this target website again with the same IP address.
Therefore, performing IP rotation automatically at regular intervals greatly reduces your chances of being detected by target websites. You can engrave without being caught in any obstacle and unnoticed.
3. Making Slow Request
Another popular step to reduce the risk of being blocked by target websites is to make the scraping process slow. It is not unnoticed that the target website is scraped with an IP address in a serial manner. This will v-cause the target website to slow down and can damage the target website. Therefore, slowing down your scraping greatly reduces your risk of being blocked.
In addition, adding an interval to the requests will be beneficial. Scraping once every second may be more noticeable. Instead of scraping the base every 2 seconds, sometimes 3 seconds, it will be very useful.
4. Scraping During Quiet Hours
For perfect web scraping, you should wait for the hours when the load of the server where the target website is located is the least. As you know, the speed of scraping is faster than the time a normal person spends on the website. This can be easily noticed by the teams monitoring the traffic of the website. For this reason, doing your scraping operations at a time when the server of the website is more comfortable, such as midnight, ensures that you are not blocked or blacklisted in any way.
5. Using the Web Scraping API
Web scraping APIs actually cover many of the issues we mentioned in the previous articles. Even more. It allows you to have the ultimate web scraping experience without any hassle.
The most developer and company preferred web scraping API today is the Zenserp API. Zenserp API provides detailed scraping of websites such as Google, YouTube, Yandex, which are especially difficult to scrape. Without experiencing any blocking. Zenserp API provides a large pool of proxy and automatic IP change. It also provides location-based proxy configuration, allowing location-based data to be scraped.
One of the main reasons why Zenserp API is preferred so much is that it provides you with the convenience of scraping the data you want by simply specifying the target website without any configuration. There are also many flexible and affordable package options available, including a free option.
Conclusion
It is certain that web scraping is the most popular way of obtaining data. In this article, we have listed with you some tips that will take away your worries of being blocked or blacklisted while scraping the web. If the most effortless and popular of these tips is for you to use the web scraping API, take a look at the powerful and detailed documentation provided by the Zenserp API.