The internet has proven to be an essential factor needed for the growth of businesses over the last decade. Though this sounds like a sure way to progress as a business, it takes skill to unleash the internet’s full potential. Getting your hands on data can assist you in making very critical decisions to grow your business. Thus, you have to be up to date with anti-scraping technology.
Website owners invest thousands in anti-bot technology to prevent hacking, DDoS attacks, and other malicious activities on their sites. However, these protections can’t distinguish between benign web scraping and more sinister intents, blocking it all the same.
That sounds like a bummer, right? Well, there is no need to worry. Like always, I am here to assist internet users with all the help they need to get going. In this article, I will talk about anti-scraping technology and how to bypass it.
What Is Web Scraping?
As its name suggests, web scraping is when we extract data from the internet. Web scraping gathers readable data from across one or multiple sites. This is done by sending requests using bots and storing the data received. This data, which is usually messy, then needs to be parsed into user-friendly formats like PDFs and spreadsheets.
It is worth mentioning that it is possible to scrape a website manually. However, using scraping tools to automate the process is quicker and more effective. Imagine how long it would take to scrape hundreds of websites manually.
Why Is Web Scraping Important?
In today’s digital economy, every business must make use of every tool available to gain an advantage over the thousands of competitors they face in their industries. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of web scraping.
Industry Insights and Analytics
Data in the modern world is an invaluable commodity. Due to this, scrapers gather all the data they can get to build massive databases containing statistics and insights from various industries. These databases may include prices of certain products, like oil, which helps companies make vital decisions to gain an edge over their competitors.
Price Comparison
No one would like to pay more for a product when they can get the same product at a cheaper price somewhere else. It is common today to see comparison websites where you can check the prices of products from various retailers. This enables buyers to get the best bang for each buck they spend. This is possible thanks to web scraping.
Lead Generation
It is common these days for companies in the B2B space to post their business information online. By using scraping technology, businesses can easily find potential clients by scraping for contact information on the net.
What Is Anti-Scraping Technology?
Web scraping is very beneficial to businesses. However, as I pointed out earlier, website owners invest vast amounts of money in preventing the use of bots on their sites.
Anti-bot technology makes it difficult to extract data from a website. To do this, the website must recognize and block requests from alleged bots and other malicious users.
How To Bypass Anti-Scraping Technology
Anti-scraping technologies and techniques have evolved over the years and keep on changing. Today, many websites use tools that can detect when a bot sends requests by analyzing the user’s behavior. This, coupled with other anti-bot techniques, makes web scraping difficult, if not impossible.
However, like most problems in the world, there is always a solution. Let’s take a look at how we can bypass anti-scraping technologies deployed on various websites.
Make Use of Rotating IPs
Your IP address will be flagged as suspicious if you send too many requests within a short period. This could result in your IP being blocked. Otherwise, your bots will be forced to fill out a CAPTCHA to prove that a real human is behind the request.
To avoid this, you can set up your scraping bot with rotating residential proxies. This allows you to automatically change your IP address to any random residential IP address. This makes it difficult for anti-bot mechanisms to detect your activities. Because each request is sent from a different IP address, it is seen as a request from different users.
Residential proxies are the best choice here because, unlike data center proxies that are sourced from data centers, these are IPs of real devices. As far as anti-bot technologies are concerned, these legitimate IPs look like regular users. Meanwhile, if they notice a data center IP, they will suspect bot activity.
Change Scraping Pattern
No matter how skilled a human is, it is impossible to repeat the same action with the same precision hundreds of times in a row. Bots, on the other hand, are programmed to do the same thing over and over again. Therefore, your bot can be easily spotted if it performs identical actions anytime it sends a request to the website.
You can, however, prevent this by programming your bot to simulate human activity. Incorporating random clicks and mouse movements can make your bot appear as a real human user rather than a machine. You can also make use of common referrers like Facebook, YouTube, or Google to appear as authentic traffic that has been redirected to the site.
Do Not Scrap Too Fast
Web scrapers can send hundreds of requests within a very short time. However, this makes it easy for anti-bot technologies to detect and block their activity.
To bypass this, you can slow down the rate at which your bot scrapes the net. You can also factor in random, periodic sleep times to mimic an actual human user. No human being can send as many requests as a bot could within any set period.
User Agent Rotation
Whenever you send a request to a website, the server receives information about you in the form of a ‘user agent.’ This information tells the server the exact web browser where the request is coming from, among other things. Anti-bot technology can find your digital fingerprint suspect and ban you as soon as it detects inhuman activity.
As such, creating a list of user agents and randomly rotating between them for each request is advisable. You can also set your user agent to a common web browser instead of your actual user agent.
Conclusion
Even though the Internet offers the opportunity for businesses to grow, it is not without resistance. While anti-scraping technology prevents the scraping of valuable data from the net, there is always a way around these blocks. Here are 5 tips on how to outsmart anti-scraping techniques.
