In this era of insane competition, companies are using all methods out there to keep their competitors at bay. For businesses, the unique process to have the upper hand is web scraping.
It’s a wonderful method often employed for efficiently extracting large amounts of data from web pages. However, a growing number of webmasters have equipped their sites with various types of anti-scraping mechanisms to block bots, making web scraping a lot more difficult.
Some common problems scrapers face during the retrieval process are IP tracking and blocking, CAPTCHA pages, honeypot traps, or abnormal content delivery delays.
But developers have come up with different tools and techniques to make the most of the information available on the web. This post covers why and how scraping tools can be undetectable.
Why A Web Scraper Should Be Undetectable
Given the increasing number of anti-scraping techniques used, it’s important for businesses to follow a set of approaches to bypass any limitations and make the most of the valuable data.
Data scraping helps brands conduct market research, find the best leads from various sources, discover business opportunities by keeping track of competitors’ activities, extract data points from other sites to make data-driven decisions, and analyze customer feedback to make important improvements.
In case of getting blocked, bots wouldn’t be able to provide such immense benefits to businesses. Therefore, it’s necessary to make scrapers undetectable for a smooth scraping process.
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How to Make Scrapers Undetectable
Websites are chock full of information, which can help businesses get a competitive advantage. But with so many anti-scraping mechanisms and tools in place, acquiring such data can get trickier. So, here are some ways following which you can bypass even the strictest of these obstructions.
Respect Robots.txt
Robots.txt file provides search engine crawlers with the standard rules about scraping, for instance, which pages/files the bot can or can’t request from a site. While many web scraping businesses respect this file of sites, some bots, including email harvesters and security vulnerability checkers, ignore the contained information.
Simply said, you should avoid flooding websites with unnecessary requests within a short duration of time.
IP Rotation
Sending requests again and again from the same IP address is a definite footprint that you are automating HTTPS/HTTP requests. So, when scraping a large website, you should keep numerous IP addresses handy.
Use proxies or VPNs to send requests through a collection of different IP addresses. Consequently, your real IP will remain concealed and enable you to scrape most websites without any issues.
Conceal and Control Digital Fingerprint
Among other ways of tracking, websites also use browser fingerprints to collect information about browser settings and attributes to identify devices. You can be immune from fingerprinting with tools like Multilogin, GoLogin, and AdsPower. GoLogin, for instance, hides and controls fingerprints by spoofing every measure that a website can see.
The best part about this software is that it can integrate with different proxy servers to change your browser fingerprinting anytime. If you are interested in proxy integration, Oxylabs wrote a blog post about GoLogin proxy integration, so make sure to check it out.
Deploy CAPTCHA Solving Service
CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are one of the most extensively used anti-scraping techniques. Many a time, these tests are hard to bypass by bots. So, if you want to scrape sites that use CAPTCHAs, it’s better to resort to CAPTCHA-solving services.
Such services are pretty inexpensive, proving to be helpful for large-scale scrapes. Using residential IP pools is excellent as they’re undetectable as proxy servers and leave no suspicion. Also, increasing the timing between requests and decreasing the number of requests sent every minute and from one IP will reduce the occurrence of CAPTCHAs.
Use Different Scraping Patterns
Human browsing has random clicks and view time; however, data scraping follows the same crawling pattern since they follow a certain logic. Their repetitive scraping behavior makes them highly detectable to anti-scraping mechanisms.
Hence, changing the scraping pattern every now and then and incorporating random mouse movements to give the process a human touch is essential. In addition, visiting the same website at different times can lessen your digital footprint.
Use Real User Agents
A user agent is like an HTTP header, which deciphers which browser you use to visit a site. Using one user agent to send massive requests irregularly will get you blocked. To prevent such a situation, you should create a list of user agents and rotate between them for each request to appear as users visitising a particular website from different locations.
Avoid Honeypot Traps
Honeypots are links on websites that are invisible to normal visitors but can be found by scrapers. These traps are computer security mechanisms set up to identify bots. It’s ideal to look for properties like “visibility: hidden”, “display: none”, or “color: #fff” CSS properties in a link to safeguard yourself.
If you detect such properties, it’s time to backtrack, or else, the site fingerprints the properties of your requests and blocks you perpetually.
Summary
Unlike in the past, web scrapers now deal with a myriad of problems, such as cookie tracking, browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHAs, and more. But if you are well informed about bypassing all these challenges, you can successfully scrape a site without getting blacklisted or blocked.
