The site can become visited not only with the right promotion, but to a greater extent due to relevant, thematic and constantly updated content. But there is also a lot of natural traffic, but it requires processing an incredible amount of information, and it is in such cases that web scraping for lead generation is used. Let’s consider web scraping if you’re interested in this strategy.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the process of obtaining data automatically using a computer. In terms of assessing the site’s content and collecting the essential information from it, the process of bypassing and downloading the site is the activity of analyzing the received pages and extracting usable information.
The program that conducts these activities was first referred to as a parser. Then they coined the name crawler and split the procedure into two distinct processes. The crawler explores the site, while the parser examines the content. Crawler has been used to refer to both operations at times, just as parser was previously.
Later, the term scraping was coined. Scraping combines the functions of a crawler and a parser.
How does web scraping work?
Run the program and load the page addresses into it. And you also fill the software with keywords and phrases, blocks and numbers that you need to collect. This program visits the specified sites and copies everything it finds to a file. It can be a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet.
When the program finishes, you will receive a file in which all information will be structured.
What is it for?
With the help of web scraping, the necessary data is collected. For example, you have a news agency and you want to analyze the texts of your competitors on a specific topic. What vocabulary do they use? How is information provided? Of course, you can find such articles manually, but it’s easier to set up the program and entrust this task to it.
Or another example: you are a lover of literature and now you are terribly eager to find information about Ukrainian poets. There is a lot information about Ukrainian literature on the Ukrainian Internet, and therefore it takes a long time to study each site. In this case, it makes sense to turn to the scraping. You enter keywords and phrases into the program, by which it will search for material about poets, and wait for the software to complete its work.
That is, anyone who wants to can scrape information. This is mostly done by individuals that need to study competition content.
Why do you need proxies for web scraping?
In web data scraping, you cannot do without a proxy. There are two reasons why intermediary servers are used. You will overcome the limits on the number of requests to the site. It is like you refresh the page a certain number of times, the anti-fraud system works on it. The site begins to perceive your actions as a DDoS attack. Bottom line – access to the page is closed, you can not go to it.
The scraper makes a huge number of requests to the site. Therefore, at any time, its work can be stopped by the anti-fraud system. To successfully collect information, even use multiple IP addresses. Everything is dependent on how many requests you need to make.
Bypass scraping protection on some resources
Some sites protect themselves from web scraping as best they can. And proxies help to bypass this protection. For example, you are scraping information from bourgeois sites, and they have protection. When the program wants to copy the contents of the pages into a table, it will be able to do this, but the resource will give you information in Chinese – not in English.
To bypass such an anti-fraud system, they use a proxy of the same server on which the site is located. For example, you need to scrape information from an American web resource with an American IP.
What proxies to use?
For web scraping you should buy only trusted paid proxies. You will be able to avoid site anti-fraud measures thanks to them. Free ones will not allow you to do so: free IP addresses have long been banned by online resources. And if you send a large number of queries from a public address, the following will happen at some point:
- The page will close access: it will give a connection error.
- The site will ask you to enter a captcha.
In the second case, you can safely continue scribing, but you will need to enter a captcha every time you access the page.
A single request may be enough for the site to deny access or require you to input a captcha. As a result, only paid intermediate servers may be used.
On the PrivateProxy website, you can purchase cheap proxies for web scraping. It also provides online help 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
How many should there be?
It is impossible to say exactly how much to use a proxy for web scraping. Each site has its own requirements, and each scraper, depending on the task, will have its own number of requests.
300-600 requests per hour from one IP address – these are the approximate site limits. It will be good if you find the resource limit with the help of tests. If you do not have such an opportunity, take the arithmetic mean: 450 requests per hour from one IP.
Which programs to apply?
There are many scraping tools. They are written in different programming languages: Ruby, PHP, Python. There are open source programs where users make changes to the algorithm if needed.
For you – the most popular programs for web scraping:
- Octoparse;
- DataOx;
Find the right software for you. Better yet, try a few and choose the best one.
And is it legal?
If you are afraid to collect data from sites, you should not. Scraping is legal. Everything that is in the public domain can be collected.
For example, you can safely scrape emails and phone numbers. This is personal information, but if the user publishes it himself, there can be no more claims.
Thanks to web scraping, users collect product catalogs, prices for these products, sports statistics, even entire texts. Scraping without blocking is real: you just need to stock up on IP addresses and change them.
