Dec 19, 2022

 Web Scraping Best Practices: A Guide to Successful Web Scraping

Large-scale web data extraction is a great technique to obtain essential data that can help you enhance business operations and boost revenue. However, because it is difficult for them to discern between legitimate researchers and dangerous users, most websites disapprove of this data collection method. Furthermore, their enterprises can suffer from servers being overrun by bot activity. Due to this, many of them have strict anti-bot safeguards in place.    

Web scrapers are vital tools that can retrieve data more quickly and extensively than people. They can be utilized for various tasks, including price comparison between different vendors, information extraction about potential leads that advertising agencies can target, thorough competition analysis, and more. However, since scrapers and bots can generate a lot of traffic, mainly if poorly implemented, they can overwhelm the website's server, harming actual users.  

What is Web Scraping?

Data extraction from websites is done automatically using a method called web scraping. To extract information or data, every publicly accessible online page can be studied and processed. Then, these data can be downloaded or saved for any purpose unrelated to the original website.

Web scraping has become a common term in today's data-driven business environment. As a result, numerous businesses and organizations conduct extensive web scraping operations to input their algorithms and conduct research. Using web scraping, you may look at HTML code and get the information you require from a website. 

Although the idea behind it is simple, large-scale internet scraping requires the use of a proxy server to hide your location since many websites have distinct web pages for different countries. The proxy must also be highly speedy in order to scrape a lot of data promptly. These reasons make ISP proxies the preferred option for web scraping.

The Need for Web Scraping

The Internet is the largest information and database. However, people, not machines, were intended to read that information. By using web scraping, you may program computers to retrieve data in an effective and machine-readable manner. People are already unable to process even a tiny portion of the information on the Internet.

Web scraping is increasingly necessary because of this. To use the kind of information that the Internet can collect for commerce, conservation, defending human rights, combating crime, and a variety of other tasks, we need computers to read that data for the users.

Challenges related to Web Scraping

Look at the most typical difficulties you could face while web scraping.

• Changes to the HTML

Sometimes, the anti-scraping techniques on the websites you're attempting to scrape are not the cause of your web scraping issues. The layout of a website varies from page to page, or the web scraper is running into unstructured datasets, which could cause problems in your script. Your code will malfunction and keep squandering time unless you employ a mechanism that reports all modifications as they occur. 

• IP Bans

You've probably run into one of these bot-detection problems at least once, even if you don't usually visit the Internet. Usually, to verify that you are human, you must check a box, retype a messy string of characters and numbers, or recognize a series of images. You won't be able to access the stuff you're searching for if you fail.

Tracking and restricting IP addresses is another method used to prevent scraping. Some websites use IP fingerprinting to identify and prohibit bots. They typically keep track of various browser-related parameters and the IP addresses used to give recommendations to their servers. They may prevent a particular IP from accessing the website if they believe it is linked to a robot. Barring violations of more severe restrictions, blocks are characteristically only temporary.

• Scraping the Incorrect Data

You may get away with this if you only scrap a few pages. However, if you're scraping in large quantities, it's simple to lose track of the information you've previously collected and end up with identical or incorrect information.

Ensure your bot is programmed to scrape only data that satisfies your quality standards. Additionally, look for websites that point users to the same material using various URLs. Duplicate value detection and prevention are possible with the correct software.     

Best Practices for Web Scraping

If you want websites to refrain from adopting stricter anti-bot measures that will make your work much smoother, you must abide by the regulations. Keep your actions moral, and the rest should be simple. The ideal methods for web scraping are listed below.     

• Use the robots.txt file correctly

Most websites contain guidelines for acceptable scraping behavior. These rules, usually present in the website's robots.txt file, specify how often you can submit requests and which sites you can collect data from. In rare circumstances, this file will even determine if you are permitted to scrape anything at all. You'd better stop if the robot.txt file for a specific website instructs you not to. Always respect any site boundaries that are in place.

• Access the request carefully

Due to their ability to search websites much more quickly than humans can, scraping bots are frequently identified by how soon they submit their request to the server. Furthermore, too many requests are sent too quickly. In that case, the system could easily get overloaded and crash the website, degrading the user experience and possibly costing its owners customers and cash. ‌

You should always leave at least 10 seconds between requests, and at busy times, even longer. Your script should include some delays and programmed sleep calls to make it appear that a human, not a robot, is making the queries.

• Rotate the IP address

To perform web scraping, multiple connection requests must be made quickly. Websites may impose request restrictions, use anti-scraping software like CAPTCHAs, or even ban IP addresses from preventing hundreds of spiders from overloading their servers. However, IP rotation is a workaround that we have.

The use of proxies is one method of IP rotation. Picking a proxy service that automatically switches the proxy IPs with each connection request is something I'd advise. Avoid persistent sessions unless your process dictates that you maintain the same identity across multiple queries. Additionally, some prohibit IPs that originate from cloud hosting providers (data center proxies), so you might have to use residential addresses in their place.

• Do not login

You must refrain from scraping a page that requests logging in. The server will recognize that the data comes from the same IP address if you attempt to retrieve it after logging in. When the website notices this behavior, it might record your login information and prevent you from continuing to scrape.

Avoid situations like this by modeling human surfing behavior, especially when identification is necessary. It will enable you to obtain the preferred information.  

• Try to use the different patterns for crawling

The way web scraping bots crawl a webpage could follow a similar pattern. They merely act that way since they are programmed to. In addition, websites with anti-crawling features can identify these bots by looking at their behavior patterns. They can stop the bot from web scraping at any point in the future if they discover any discrepancies.

You must remember to include random taps and mouse clicks in the bot to prevent an instance like this. The website should appear to be crawled by a person, not a bot.

Benefits of Web Scraping

• Cost-effective

Does scraping require a complicated system? Rethink that! An easy scraper will often do the trick, saving you from hiring extra people or being concerned about development expenses. The whole point of scraping programs is to automate repetitive operations, although those jobs are frequently not that difficult. Even better, so many pre-made tools are available that you might not even need to design or order a new scraper.

• Versatile and adaptable

Due to their complete customization, scrapers are now even more affordable. If you build a scraper for one purpose, you can frequently adapt it with minor adjustments for another activity. Additionally, they are flexible solutions that may be altered as your needs or difficulties change. Scraping bots are devices that may evolve with you and your workflow. 

• Reliable and accurate

With the proper configuration, the scraper will accurately and almost certainly error-free capture data directly from websites. People need to improve at repeated, tedious work. Users have limits on how quickly they can work, and we become bored easily. If you get the initial setup perfect, you can be confident that your scraper will provide dependable and correct results for whatever length you require because bots don't have those issues.

• Automated Structured Data

For simplicity of reading and sorting, computers prefer material that has been organized. This implies that each data item must be arranged into what a person would see as a spreadsheet. Scraped data can be used in different databases and programs immediately because it always enters in a machine-readable format. The structured information you obtain from your scraping solution will be compatible with other tools if appropriately configured.

Conclusion: Rainproxy and Web Scraping Services

Data collection from the web with web scraping can be effective. It can be done quickly, effectively, and with some ease. Before you begin web scraping, you should know a few things.       

First, in some circumstances, site scraping may be forbidden. Make sure you get the legal authority to scrape websites for commercial gain if you intend to do so. Web scraping could be difficult, too. Some websites can be trickier to scrape than others, even though several user-friendly, coding-free web scraping solutions are available.

Rainproxy offers various methods for web scraping. You can begin with automated tools and your own generated solutions, but for the best and most effective web scraping services, it is essential to let the experts do their job.