BECOME

A WEB SCRAPING PRO

WITH THESE 5 TIPS
The internet is the magic box of the 21st century. Searching for
information is easy. By merely typing a couple of words into your
browser, you would pretty much get all the information you need.

Abundant data does not translate to purposeful or structured

information. And if you choose to organize data manually, you should
be prepared for long hours of grueling work and the possibility of
experiencing error along the way.

Here's where web scraping comes into play.

Whatever industry you are in, you need data — and that's why tech
companies are making big bucks from data.

To join the ride, you need to horn your web scraping skills.

Whether you are an amateur looking for how to improve your skills or
are a veteran in the industry, here are five tips to help you become a
web scraping pro.

1. RESPECT EACH WEBSITE, ITS USERS,

AND SCRAPE SLOWLY

First things first, you've got to respect the internet, the websites found
on it, and its users.

To do that, you have to read the robots.txt file found on a website.

Typically, the robots.txt file shows you what pages to scrape on a

website. It's more like the web scraping roadmap of a website.
Aside from respecting the website, it would help if you prioritized the
respect of other visitors. Intensive web scraping causes a strain on the
bandwidth of a website. This will, in turn, lead to poor user experience
for other web users.

This may sound simple. But if you don't obey these unwritten rules, you
may get your IP address blocked.

Scraping slowly is the next rule to respect.

One of the primary aims of web scraping is to get data at a breakneck

pace — at least, web scraping has to be much faster than the manual
process.

If the scraping is relatively much faster than the manual process, the
website may recognize it as a bot. That is, a superbly fast browsing
speed will most likely be seen as a scraping bot.

To curb this, you've got to scrap slowly (human-like scraping) and add a
couple of delays to come off as human.

2. KNOW WHEN YOU'RE BLOCKED AND

AVOID REPEAT BLOCKING

Scraping is not acceptable on some websites. And with anti-scraping

methods, web owners are fully out to stop web crawlers on their site.

Ideally, if you are blocked, you'd get the 403 error code. Other times,
malicious strategies are used to block web scrapers — and it is pretty
difficult to identify such when it happens.
To get the most out of web scraping, you've got to know how to avoid
repeat blocking.

Here's a glimpse of what goes behind the scene on the web.

Whenever a visitor lands on a website, the visitor's user agent is read by

the website.

The user agent provides a blueprint on how the visitor lands on the
website — the visitor's browser, the browser's version, the visitor's device,
and much more.

Individuals who have no user-agent are seen as bots.

One way of avoiding this is by regularly updating your user agent. Also,
you should avoid using old browser versions.

3. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF HEADLESS BROWSER

If you land on a website that Javascript renders its content, you would
have a hard time scraping directly from the HTML.

The best way of scraping from such websites is by using headless

browsers. A headless browser processes the Javascript and interprets
all the content.

One advantage of this method is that it makes you come off as human.

4. USE THE RIGHT TOOLS AND PROXIES

Anti scraping systems are always on the lookout for IP addresses.

If it is detected, the IP would be blacklisted, and the user won't be able
to scrape or revisit the site.

Here is why proxies are essential.

When proxies are used, the request would appear to be coming from a
different IP address. If you are using a standard proxy, you are sure to
get data center IP addresses.

In such cases, those IP addresses would be detected and blocked.

Premium proxies are quite different as they provide residual proxies,

which allows the user to bypass geographical restrictions. This will, in
turn, enable you to scrape complex websites like Amazon and Google.

5. BUILD WEB CRAWLERS

Web crawlers are tools associated with the web scraping API. The
crawler will feed the API tons of URLs for data collection.

The list will be updated at intervals during crawling and scraping. To get
the most out of web crawlers, you would have to set rules. These rules
will determine the URLs to be scraped and the ones to ignore.

CONCLUSION
BECOME A WEB SCRAPING PRO WITH THESE 5 TIPS

Web scraping is not rocket science. By merely taking advantage of

headless browsers, you'd come off as human and avoid being blocked.
Also, you've got to update your user agent and avoid using old browsers
regularly.

Proxies will come in handy if you want to be found on different IP

addresses.

Finally, build web crawlers and respect the website and its users.