How to Scrape a Website without Getting Blocked?

When you want to gather and analyse data, let it be for comparison of prices, to know latest trends or to see customers preferences and choices, web scraping services are a great and essential way of collecting desired data in short period of time. However, most of the websites do not like to be heavily scraped, while, sub of the websites don't allow scraping at all.

There are some of the rules to follow if you do not want to be blocked from scraping a website, whether it be temporary or permanently.

Scrape slowly: The main purpose of scraping is to gather data quickly. As a result of this, bot scrapers browse websites quickly. The websites can easily know how long an individual is spending order each web page and if it isn't human, then your IP address will be blocked. You must limit the speed of scraping. It is vital that you identify the optimal speed of the website and add some delays in between the pages and requests.

Honeypot traps: Honeypot traps are the links that are hidden the HTML code. These aren't visible by regular visitors. This is the reason that when those links are visited, the website gets to know that there is a scraper on the page and it will block the IP address.

Respect robots.txt and the website too: The robots.txt states the rules of crawling. Some of the websites do not allow anyone to scrap their website. If you scrape a website without going through the robots.txt file, then you might overload the website server which can affect its performance badly. The website owner might block you to rebalance the performance. Thus, you must respect the website by going through the robots.txt file.

Scraping patterns: If not specified, the bots will always use the most effective path. This seems to be great for an individual who needs data quickly but it might result in getting the websites slow. As a result, you might get your IP address blocked. To avoid being blacklisted, you must said some delays in between the clicks, add some random clicks and add some mouse movements in between.

IP rotation: IP rotation is one of the keys of Web scraping Services. Most of the E-commerce websites do not appreciate scraping practices. When you are sleeping a particular website, it receives multiple requests from a single IP address. As a result, you might get blocked. To avoid be into the blacklist, you need to use proxies. Proxies use different IP address to pave a path towards ethical web scraping practices.