Successful Web Scraping: 5 Best Practices

These helpful web-scraping techniques will also be our topic today, so let’s dive right in.

21:11 06 September 2024

Real-time information is critical for business success. The demand for it is rising, and web scraping is emerging as a primary way of quenching this thirst. It’s a technique that individuals and businesses worldwide use to get real-time information from the vast ocean of information-rich websites.

However, web scraping has its challenges. Navigating the information-rich sites also requires bypassing their defenses, and scrapers turn to various advanced techniques for help. These helpful web-scraping techniques will also be our topic today, so let’s dive right in.

Web Scraping 101

Web scraping operations refer to data extraction from a website. Whether you’re an individual or a company, web scraping is a valuable and efficient way to grab stock prices, product details, company contacts, sports stats, and other types of invaluable data you can use to your advantage. 

However, modern websites also have various restrictions to deter web scrapers, making the operation particularly challenging.

Top 5 Web Scraping Practices

Although frustrating, website restrictions are bypassable when you have the right tools, and to help you overcome these, we’ve included a list of the top five web scraping practices. They include the following:

• Respect the Website’s Terms and the Robots.txt File – Web scraping operations can strain the website, which is why many sites have a robots.txt file where web scraping bots can learn what’s allowed. Following these restrictions and respecting the website’s scraping rules is vital, as it can get you what you need without overloading the site and ruining the experience for others.
• Continuously Verify the Integrity of Extracted Data – Many web scrapers leave the data parsing operation for the end of the process. If there’s a problem, the procedure must be repeated, and thousands of scraped pages go to the trash. Therefore, regularly and automatically checking extracted data is highly advised, as it’ll help prevent potential issues early.
• Use a Location Proxy to Bypass Geo-Blocks – Geographic restrictions are a frustrating part of the web scraping experience. Fortunately, accessing a US website from Europe or Asia is entirely possible, and all you need is a US residential proxy. While a US residential proxy works wonders for the USA, there are other residential proxy servers for other countries.
• Use Headless and Antidetect Browsers – A headless browser can significantly speed up your scraping activities, as they don’t display visual content. On the other hand, antidetect browsers can reduce your chances of being flagged as a scraping bot, as they change your IP address, OS, and browser details with each request.
• Employ Rotating Proxies to Bypass Anti-Scraping Measures – Most websites have anti-scraping measures to manage web scraping bot traffic, prevent overload, and protect themselves against malicious bots, often banning the IPs of suspicious users that they deem non-human traffic. However, rotating proxy servers can prevent this by constantly changing the scraper’s IP address.

Most experienced scrapers combine these techniques to bypass scraping barriers and extract valuable data, making them an easy choice for web-scraping novices.

Types of Rotating Proxies

Rotating proxy servers are always an excellent idea and are highly recommended for various web scraping operations, but did you know there’s more than one type of these? Let’s dive into these types and help you choose the best one for your scraping needs.

• Rotating Residential Proxies – As their name suggests, residential proxies refer to those servers that borrow IPs from genuine desktop and mobile devices connected to home networks. They’re some of the best options on the market, and scrapers often use them for their excellent price-to-performance ratios, although they’re not as swift as the next type.
• Rotating Datacenter Proxies – Using IPs provided by data centers, rotating datacenter proxies are the fastest and most affordable type. They’re perfect for users needing many IPs but aren’t as difficult to detect as the above-mentioned types. However, many users love using them for improved cybersecurity and enhanced browsing anonymity.
• Rotating Mobile Proxies – These proxy servers use IP addresses from smartphones and tablets connected to 4G (LTE) / 5G networks. As such, they’re perfect for web scraping. Detecting them is nearly impossible, as the proxy server constantly swaps genuine IPs. Many people use them for increased anonymity, low detection chances, and the appearance of a real user.

Rotating proxy servers will always be an excellent investment, regardless of the one you choose. Due to their nature, they’re more challenging to detect, making them ideal for web scraping.

Conclusion

Learning the various web-scraping approaches is vital to obtaining insightful data from data-rich sites with challenging anti-scraping measures. 

From headless browsers to rotating proxies to using a US residential proxy to bypass US-based sites’ geo-restrictions, we’ve included a list of the top five web scraping practices and revealed tips for successful web scraping and efficient information gathering. Use them, and you’ll always have insightful data for your business operations.