How To Extract Web Page Data Without Getting Blocked?

Web scraping is to extract information from websites. It is amazing when you get to know about your competitors, as they are making good money with which products, which keywords have the most numbers of searches or, at what similar products they are selling and a lot more. In short, you can get straight to anything from leads’ history to market research.

It all points at achieving big dreams quickly, wherein the web scraping company & researchers can get you into the analysis of whatever contextual content you scrape. But unfortunately, you cannot get any piece of information without taking permission from the owner. If you go against his will, its consequences can be dangerous because it is unethical & illegal.

Don’t panic! All doors are not yet shut. You still have some scraping tools and techniques to catch up with the information that you want for product or business intelligence.

Trending practices for web scraping

• Robot.txt

This is a file with the list of all pages. The bots or spiders come across it and then, crawl and index the web pages. However, the crawling & indexing can be manipulated, which indicates the pages that you don’t want to crawl into "disallow" through a nofollow command. The search engine bots abide by it.

If you are likely to extract the pricing from an e-Commerce page, let’s say, you have to keep stock of the aforesaid fact. Go through the robot.txt file to know if you are targeting for the page that has been disallowed.

• Limit Your Requests

There are a few automated tweaks that can instantly message the target browser and website about an unknown attempt of vulnerability. However, it is scraping for you. But, the website takes it as an infringement. Before everything goes too ugly to turn around, just make sure that you have not sent relentless requests from the same IP address. If the robot.txt file doesn’t allow, don’t attempt to get the prohibited web content. It’s always better to run off-peak hours crawling.

Identify Anti-bot Mechanism

Some hackers deploy bots to access any online content. When a human feels being stuck in differentiating, the anti-bot systems identifies if it is a bot and a human who tried to access the website. It analyses upon detecting and categorises specific patterns that assist in identifying the attack of bots. So, its mechanism can reduce the chances of DDOS attacks, credential stuffing and online frauds.

However, you can get the digital information that is public. It is simple and the nicest way. But sometimes, you cannot have it because of the missing API. So, you are left with just one option that is scraping.

Tips to Avoid Being Blocked

• Header Validation

Every browser, as Firefox, Chrome and Safari, has its unique header. The target server identifies which browser has sent the request. Here, the unique value, structure & pattern of the particular browser’s header tell everything about. The anti-bot recognizes if that pattern doesn’t look similar (inconsistent) to the regular structure.

If you want to get that piece of content, use custom user-agent, which oftentimes looks similar to the real header. But, you may have more hurdles to come across because of the programming is ever changing.

• TCP/ IP Fingerprinting

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or IP fingerprinting is must to set up & maintain a network conversation. It is through which application programs exchange data. But sometimes, the fingerprints evaluate the superfluous TTL (Time to Live) and unnatural window size fields go out of the way, which an operating system does not behave naturally.

This is how the website notices explosion of incoming traffic, which is way better than the human control. So, avoid this trick for extracting any text of the web pages.

• IP Blocking

Every datacenter has its own unique IP. It helps owners to recognise where the request for the content is coming from. If it receives outnumbering requests frequently and consistently, the web owner can instantly block your entry considering you as a robot.

So, you should always use other datacenter proxies or residential proxies to get off this kind of blocking.

• Geo-Blocking

There are websites that intentionally barricade requests from certain countries or regions. This is the case of government websites, which carry a ton of sensitive and confidential soft copies. You cannot easily combat this geographical barrier.

But, there are proxies or VPN services that can let you get whatever information that you intend to have.

Being a digital business strategist, Lovely has gained grounds in the digital transformation. He lets the performance speak about the plus and minus of what is done, which helps him drive to winning strategies over the internet.