The Best Tips for Web Scraping with Proxies
Some websites can hold invaluable data for your business or your project: stock values, goods features, games stats, business connections, and almost anything else you want to use for statistics and leads. If you need this information, you would have to use web scraping or copy-paste the data manually into a new record. To avoid becoming an automated monkey, you need to learn the best tips for web scraping with proxies.
Table of Content
What can web scrapers do for you?
What proxies are best for web scraping?
Avoid using high-risk geolocations
Each IP should have a unique user agent
Set up a native referrer source
Don’t make requests at the same interval
What can web scrapers do for you?
The uses for web scraping are as endless as there is information on the internet. Every bit of data can help you in some way; you just need to focus on your needs. Here are just a few of the most common uses. You can feel free to use your imagination to expand this list for your project’s requirements.
You can scrape:
- stock prices easily by using web scraping on Yahoo Finance.
- data from directories to get valuable business information and leads including business data, addresses, phone numbers and more.
- business data from a store locator to create a list of competitors’ locations, potential customers for B2B, or businesses in a certain area.
- data from Amazon to understand buyer’s behavior and insights.
- sports stats for betting. This is the easy way to lower your risks and get invaluable data for statistics.
- product details. This allows you to compare competitors’ prices or simply to buy better items at better prices.
Proxies for Market Research
A proxy is as good as its response time when it is used for web scraping. A few milliseconds delay may not seem much, but when scraping thousands of pages, it can be transformed into several hours of extra work for your crawlers.
Smartproxy offers market research proxies for ad verification, link testing, data collection, brand protection, price comparison, SEO, and many more.
What proxies are best for web scraping?
Using a good proxy you will assure the success of your web scraping project, avoiding suspicion and IP blocks. Furthermore, a residential IP makes you even harder to be detected, almost virtually impossible. That is why a residential proxy comes on top even if it is a bit more expensive.
Another proxy for web scraping is the mobile residential proxy. This is harder to come by and to be fair normal residential proxies are enough for web scraping. Ordering high-quality residential proxies for web scraping is vital because a free or cheap proxy can make you vulnerable, stop working mid-task, or get the user blocked.
Many websites are observant of data center proxies and may obstruct them automatically. They acknowledge redundant actions on their website as suspect and will prevent these proxies as anticipation.
Avoid using high-risk geolocations
Whichever proxy you choose, it will change your IP address to a designated country of origin. When choosing the country and/or city, make sure that it is not banned to reach the website you are going to scrape. Some websites block countries for various reasons. Therefore, you may need to do thorough research regarding this aspect before purchasing proxies.
Each IP should have a unique user agent
The browser has the user agent tag that allows it to distinguish between devices. Therefore, the browser can discern the number of identical requests from the same device and mark it as suspicious if all of them have the same user agent.
Sessions from the same user agent and different IP can be flagged as the same user. To make sure that does not happen, change the user agent to become unique for each IP.
Set up a native referrer source
The referrer source shows how you reached the web page. The possible values of the referrer source are: direct (when you have entered the URL directly in your browser), search (when you clicked on it from the search engine results page), email (when you enter the website using a link from an email), social (when you click a link from a social media platform), unknown (when you reach the website by any other means).
The problem with this parameter can arise when you have the proxy IP of country X and the referrer source points to country Y. Therefore, by setting referrer source to point to the same country as the used proxy, you get a native referrer source.
Set a rate limit on request
Rate limiting is a method commonly used to control the number of requests sent or received from your network. This is a defensive measure that you can put in place to be sure that your proxy doesn’t end up being blocked and flagged as a bot.
Don’t make requests at the same interval
The best way to go is by setting random intervals and, thus, avoiding suspicion. You must understand that randomness is paramount to get through protection systems because they are looking for patterns and algorithms. You should randomize every parameter that permits this in your automation method.
Conclusion
Picking the best proxy is crucial. Its job is to hide the user’s IP address, but some proxies may be quickly recognizable as proxies and can end up becoming blocked. Low-quality proxies may stop working at the peak of their operation duty and reveal the user’s IP address.
You can be assured that the proxy is appropriate for the job by choosing a residential proxy. This is a necessary first move for a flourishing web scraping project.
These are the best tips for web scraping with proxies. In order to get valuable data from the internet treasure trove, you will need the ultimate guide to web scraping.
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