Proxy Rotation – the Ultimate Method of Avoiding Blocks While Scraping?

The internet is a vast landscape whose functions and characteristics are hardly understood by most of its users. The data that you can access via your preferred search engine is just but a minuscule percentage of all the information available on the World Wide Web. There is a deep web that holds more information than the surface web.

Additionally, malware and bots generate more traffic on the internet than humans do. Data shows that two thirds or 61.5% of all web traffic come from these two sources. The truth is, most online users do not know what happens behind the scenes when they browse the web.

Consequently, most internet users are always in danger of identity theft and data security breaches when they leave their digital footprints online. Proxy servers can, however, make internet use safer.

What are proxy servers?

A proxy server acts as an intermediary between your computer and the internet. The server separates end-users from their World Wide Web increasing online privacy, security, and functionality. When you 

have a proxy server in place in your business's computer networks, the server will access the direct all internet traffic through it to the web addresses queried.

All results will also travel back to your computer network, through the proxy server to ensure that your IP addresses are hidden. The proxy server also acts like a web filter and firewall for all your business's online requests.

The proxy will not only make your connection safer and more private, but it will also improve the performance of the network. Proxy servers cache data, which speeds up regular web requests. These tools are especially useful in web scraping.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping, also referred to as data scraping, extraction, or web harvesting, is the process of obtaining large amounts of online information via web browsers or Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). In its most simplified format, data scraping is automated, regular copy and pasting.

This process, however, can not only mine massive amounts of data at high speeds but also can analyze and save it in an easy to use format such as CSV. The process sounds like a novel internet feature because its use revolves around new terminologies such as machine learning or big data, but it is not new at all.

Data scraping is almost as old as the World Wide Web itself, with the first automated web crawler JumpStation, coming onboard in 1993. The web robot is the predecessor of the present programmatic web crawlers that not only organize but harvest internet data.

The very first point and click visual web scraper tool was released in 2006. With it, users could select the web content that they wished to scrape into a database or excel file. Since then, web scraping has come a long way. The process is, however, very reliant on proxy server use.

How proxy rotation is used in web scraping

Web scraping requires the use of proxy rotation for useful and anonymous data collection. Proxies hide your IP address, ensuring that during web scraping activities, your identity is veiled. The web sites that you are scraping data from will only view the IP address of your proxy server instead.

Websites are, however, engineered to prevent data scraping. If these mechanisms recognize that one IP address is making numerous web requests, they will flag or ban that IP address to prevent data mining or spamming. Web scraping tools use proxy rotation to provide a steady stream of different IP addresses that veil web scraping activities.

What are some use cases of web scraping?

• As a business

The technology required to perform web scraping is improving by the day, enabling all types of companies and individuals to collect high-value information easily. Websites, on the other hand, have become complex and harder to scrape, meaning that web scraping software designers need to innovate regularly to keep up with these changes.

Research shows that businesses that harness data for insights can scale their operations at an average annual rate of 30%. The need for web scraping tools is so critical that companies that leverage big data insights on customer behavior understanding outperform those that do not, garnering 85% more growth in sales.

The need for these bots in business is bottomless, meaning that there are vast opportunities for web scraping software creation and innovation businesses.

• Increased access to business data

Web scraping can bring in essential data from sources such as open government databases, which in most cases have very sluggish APIs. Data scrapers can also mine data from your databases to enrich your profile with every form of useful information.

• In sales

Web scrapers can mine and analyze sales data from websites and social media platforms to access insights that will help you build better lead generation strategies. You can also scrape your competition's e-commerce sites and social media platforms to strengthen your marketing strategy.

• Brand monitoring

Customer sentiments have become very crucial to brand success. Most businesses have no access at all to customer reviews and ratings of their brand. You can use web scraping to extract then aggregate these sentiments for actionable insights. You can use data scrapers to comb the internet for negative publicity and attend to it in a good time. You can also use these tools to halt copyright, piracy, and counterfeiting.

Methods used to reduce blocks while scraping

• Websites use various detection methods to detect web scraping. They can quickly identify high download or unusual traffic rates from one IP address, especially if all this attention is occurring in a short period.
• A web scraper also performs automated, repetitive page tasks, which are not human at all. The website can, therefore, tell that these actions are not useful to the website's owner.
• Websites are also increasingly adding honeypots or links that are invisible to regular web activity, but very accessible to bots. If a web scraper, therefore, accesses these links, it will get caught in the trap and get banned or blocked.

To minimize chances of banning or blocks while data scraping you should;

• Data scraping as per the website recommended rules in its Robots.txt file
• Use web-scraping tools that have programmatic sleep calls or auto throttling mechanisms. These features will ensure that your activities will not overload a website, which could lead to IP blocking.
• Human activity on a website is not as repetitive as a bot is. Many crawlers have the same crawling pattern meaning that they are easily detectable. Your web scrapers should, therefore, have random clicks to imitate human behavior.
•  Use proxy rotation to ensure that your activity resembles access from different users. A random pool of rotating IPs for each request will not only hide your IP address but hide data scraping as well.

Conclusion

Web scraping is very beneficial to businesses and can help provide groundbreaking results and innovation from the data the process provides. There are nevertheless challenges that hinder it, but fortunately, web-scraping tools that employ proxy rotation can help you to overcome some of these challenges.