Today, data forms the infrastructure of many applications and businesses. Businesses can develop their growth strategies by obtaining data from the internet. This clearly reveals the power of data. With the recent development of technology, web scraping techniques are frequently preferred in obtaining data from the internet. Businesses and developers can Scrapper api with a web scraping tool easily and quickly.
Obtaining data with web scraping tools that have web scraping techniques is known as the most cost-effective method of obtaining data in recent times. With web scraping tools, businesses automatically obtain data from target websites. Additionally, web scraping tools are used in many machine learning projects to train algorithms with current data. So, have you ever thought about what we should pay attention to to prevent blocking when developing a web scraping tool? In this article, we will give tips for developing seamless web scraping tools. But first, let’s talk about the importance of uninterrupted web scraping.
What is the Importance of Web Scraping Without Getting Blocked?
Making web scraping unblocked is very important for businesses and developers in this age where data is important. Automated extraction of data from the internet without blocking it is important for many business and analytical applications such as competitive analysis, market research, price comparisons, news monitoring, and more. This data mining method helps businesses understand market trends and competitor activities, base their decisions on information, and increase their efficiency through automation.
Seamless data scraping has many use cases in the sector. Some of these use cases are as follows:
- E-commerce Competitive Analysis: With seamless web scraping, businesses can monitor prices, products, and promotions of competing e-commerce sites. So they can gain a competitive advantage.
- Market Research: Many businesses conduct market research by collecting customer comments, product features, and price information from many popular websites. This allows businesses to optimize their product strategies.
- Price Comparisons: This is one of the most popular use cases of seamless web scraping. In e-commerce or the travel industry, businesses can offer customers the best deals by comparing prices from different suppliers.
- Financial Analysis: Trading platforms can support their users’ investment decisions by monitoring financial data such as stocks, exchange rates, and commodity prices.
- Automation: Web scraping allows businesses to manage business processes efficiently by automating repetitive tasks.
Ways of Web Scraping Without Getting Blocked
In this section, we will list some tips to consider when developing a web scraping tool that prevents getting blocked.
Use Proxy Server
The use of proxy servers is the first step for an uninterrupted web scraping experience. It helps hide IP addresses during web scraping.
Some proxy types prevent blocking in web scraping tools. These are residential and data center proxies. These proxies provide high efficiency and privacy in web scraping processes. With proxies, businesses can avoid blocks and restrictions by sending requests through multiple IP addresses. Zenscrape API, one of the most popular web scraping APIs integrated into web scraping tools today, has a proxy pool with millions of IP addresses. It also features anti-blocking web scraping proxies. This makes web scraping more anonymous and less likely to be tracked.
IP Rotation
IP rotation is a very common method used during web scraping or web automation. This method is used to prevent multiple requests or queries using the same IP address from being detected and blocked by the website. It is also useful for bypassing IP-based restrictions or bypassing blocks.
IP rotation involves these basic steps:
- Creating an IP Pool: Before starting the IP rotation process, you need to create an IP pool containing the different IP addresses you will use. These IP addresses can be easily obtained from different sources or proxy services.
- IP Changing: Before each web request or query, an IP address is selected randomly or sequentially from the IP pool and the request is sent with this IP address.
Powerful web scraping APIs like Zenscrape have millions of IP addresses and provide IP rotation automatically. In this way, users do not need to make any configuration for the IP rotation process.
Set User-Agent
User-Agent is an HTTP header through which a web browser or an HTTP client identifies itself to the server. This header helps web servers understand which browser or client is sending incoming requests. Editing or setting the User-Agent header during web scraping is used to prevent the website from detecting requests as an automated bot or to make it behave like a more advanced browser.
Example:
You can use the ‘requests’ library to set the User-Agent header using a Python code. The sample code for setting User-Agent is as follows:
| import requests # Customize User-Agent header headers = { ‘User-Agent’: ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36’ } # Send request to website url = ‘https://example.org response = requests.get(url, headers=headers) # Process data from the website print(response.text) |
Follow Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file located in the root directory of a website. This file is a protocol that tells web crawlers and web scraping bots which pages or domains can or cannot be crawled. Website owners determine which parts they want to be public and which parts they want not to be public through the robots.txt file. It is very important for developers and businesses to act according to the robots.txt files of target websites during web scraping processes.
A web scraping bot first checks the robots.txt file in the root directory of the website. For example, a website’s robots.txt file might look like this:
| User-Agent: * Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /admin/ |
Add Interval to Requests
Adding time intervals to requests during web scraping or data extraction is a very useful approach in web scraping processes. It is a strategy used to avoid overloading a website or target resource and preventing website owners from detecting you as an automated bot. This strategy makes web scraping more respectful by sending requests at a certain speed and regular intervals.
The main reasons for adding a time window to requests are:
- Avoiding Overload: Fast and consecutive requests can overload the web server and cause the service to be interrupted or slowed down. Adding a time interval makes the server react healthier.
- Preventing Bot Detection: Websites try to detect bots that send requests very quickly and repeatedly. Adding a regular time interval helps prevent such detections and reduces the risk of being detected as a bot.
Example:
During a web scraping operation, a code example to add a specific time interval between requests could be like this (using Python):
| import requests import time # Add a 2 second time interval between requests for url in url_list: response = requests.get(url) time.sleep(2) |
Thanks to its powerful infrastructure, Zenscrape web scraping API automatically adds certain intervals to web scraping requests. In this way, developers behave respectfully towards target websites during web scraping processes without making any additional development.
Detecting Target Website Changes
Tracking changes in the structure of the website helps prevent errors that may occur during web scraping. While web scraping, the target website may be constantly updated or some changes may be made. These changes are a factor that can prevent your web scraping from working properly. Therefore, monitoring and adapting to changes on the website is very important for businesses and developers. Detecting target website changes is a strategy used to ensure the data scraping is up-to-date and error-free.
To implement this strategy, the following steps can be followed:
- Monitor Data Structure: Carefully monitor the data structure on the target website. Periodically observe which pages and fields have changed and whether new features or data points have been added.
- Critical Data Check: Periodically check the critical data you use in your web scraping (for example, using XPath or CSS selectors). This helps you determine whether data points have changed or been relocated.
- Monitoring Website Updates: It is very important to follow the update announcements of website owners or administrators. This can help you stay informed about future changes to the website.
Use CAPTCHA Solving Service
CAPTCHA is a security measure known by the abbreviation “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. This test helps websites distinguish real people rather than automated bots.
CAPTCHA can include text-based questions, visual recognition, or mathematical problems, making it difficult for bots to respond automatically. Some websites use CAPTCHA to prevent automated scraping. CAPTCHA solver services are used to automatically solve such security measures and not hinder web scraping. For this reason, CAPTCHA solvers in web scraping tools are one of the most effective ways to prevent users from being blocked.
Reduce Scraping Speed
Speed throttling when web scraping refers to requests and queries sent to the website being sent slower and more regularly. This strategy is used to prevent overly fast and consecutive requests from overloading the website or detecting you as an automated bot.
Use a Headless Browser
Headless browsers are a version of a traditional web browser that just runs in the background without a user interface (UI). Headless browsers are frequently used for viewing web pages, pulling content, and performing web scraping. This method allows you to make web scraping more automatic and programmatic. It is one of the steps that prevents blocking. Details of using a headless browser:
- Preventing Bot Detection: Websites try to detect automated bots and take some security measures to prevent these bots from accessing them. Headless browsers reduce the risk of being detected as a bot. They just pull web content and don’t render a user interface.
- JavaScript Support: Headless browsers can run JavaScript, allowing you to easily retrieve the dynamic content of web pages. This is important when scraping data from modern websites.
Stop Repeated Failed Attempts
Repeated unsuccessful scraping attempts may result in the website blocking you. Therefore, you can automatically stop retries by saving the pages or actions in which errors were received. This can help prevent overload.
Conclusion
As a result, web scraping stands out as a powerful tool for collecting and analyzing data on the internet. However, the key to successfully performing this process is to avoid frustration and take a very respectful approach. It is extremely important to reduce the risk of blocking, maintain a good relationship with target websites, and make the data collection process reliable. Minimizing the risk of disruption ensures that your data scraping is continuous and effective, which can provide a competitive advantage.
FAQs
Q: What are Some Exclusive Web Scraping Tools in the Market?
A: Some of the best web scraping APIs in the market are as follows:
- Zenscrape API
- Zenserp API
- ScraperAPI
- ScrapingBee API
- The scrapestack API
- Scrapingdog API
Q: What is the Best Way of Scraping a Website?
A: The best way to scrape a website today is to use a powerful web scraping API. Web scraping APIs offer the best web scraping experience at the least cost.
Q: What is the Importance of Web Scraping?
A: The importance of web scraping is quite diverse. The Internet contains vast amounts of data and information, and this data is an extremely valuable resource for businesses, researchers, and developers. Web scraping is a method used to access and automatically extract this data. This can be used in market research, competitive analysis, price comparisons, trend analysis, and more.
Q: Does Zenscrape Scrape a Website Without Getting Blocked?
A: Yes, it does. It prevents obstruction in web scraping processes with services such as its proxy pool and automatic IP rotation.
