Scraping the web is an effective way to gain valuable insights into your competitors, your customers, and your own business.
By gathering data through web-scraping techniques, you can transform your company’s pricing strategy, you’ll always know what your competition is up to, and you can get inside the minds of your audience like never before. But unfortunately, not everyone is happy with web scrapers crawling their sites.
Website owners are always trying to find new ways to block bots and web scrapers from their sites. But luckily for you, no anti-scraping technique is completely bot-proof.
Below, you’ll learn more about common anti-scraping mechanisms used by website owners, as well as how you can work your way around them. Ready to do some scraping?
What is web scraping?
In a nutshell, web scraping refers to the automated process in which a robot (or web crawler) visits a URL (e.g., any query on Google Search) and extracts its data to present it somewhere else (like in a local database).
For example, you can use a web scraping tool for your business to analyze your competitors. In that case, the web scraper can crawl your competitors’ websites, extract all the data from those websites, and then present it to you in an accessible, easy-to-read format.
Many different web scraping applications can benefit your business. Some common uses include:
- Competitive price monitoring
- Lead generation
- News aggregation
- Social listening
- SEO monitoring
It’s easy to imagine the possibilities offered by web scraping and how it might help you drive revenue for your business. But not everyone likes having these scrapers around…
Why sites protect themselves from scraping tools
For starters, competitors might not like you snooping around on their sites. Another common reason is that large numbers of bots on a site can harm speed and performance. Nowadays, there are so many bots that it is estimated that nearly a quarter of all traffic in 2019 was made up of bad bots!
On top of that, some people may use web crawlers to attack a site or unlawfully steal its data purposefully. They can send thousands of bots at once to a website to try and crash it or scrape entire sites to create a duplicate version to try and scam unknowing customers.
That is why many website owners put countermeasures to prevent bots from crawling and scraping their site. Four of the most common protection methods are:
- CAPTCHA
- Honeypot traps
- IP restrictions
- Login requirements
Even though bots are continually evolving and becoming more challenging to detect, many of these methods still work on most bots.
We’ll discuss these methods and how best to circumvent each of them in more detail below. But in any case, a first and often essential method of avoidance is by using proxy servers.
Proxies and web scraping
A proxy lets a user (in this case, a bot) use a different IP address than that of their device. When a bot visits a website, but through a proxy server, the website will think it is a new user coming to the site. And that’s helpful when trying to prevent your bot from being blocked.
For example, if your bot enters a site and crawls through every link, there is a good chance it will be detected as non-human behavior. As a result, the site might automatically block the bot’s IP address.
However, if the bot switches to a different proxy server, the site will think it’s a new user. Many web scraping tools keep rotating proxies like that to avoid detection.
So now you know why proxies are essential for web scraping, let’s have a closer look at the most common protection methods and how to avoid them further.
Common protection methods and how to avoid them
CAPTCHA
Possibly the most common anti-scraping technique is the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” better known as CAPTCHA.
A CAPTCHA test presents the user with a set of images from which they have to select specific ones, a blurred text they have to retype, or a tick box to confirm you are human.
Although there are ways for robots to solve CAPTCHAs, it is much easier to avoid the CAPTCHA from being triggered. A great way to do this is by rotating proxies, so your bot behaves more human-like. Similarly, you can slow down your bot’s scraping time, so it appears less automated.
Honeypot traps
A honeypot trap is a common anti-scraping technique and one of the most challenging processes to circumvent.
Honeypot traps are links on a website invisible to normal users but visible to a robot. Since your web scraper doesn’t know that this link is different from any other link, it follows it. As soon as the scraper does so, the website knows it’s a scraper, and it can automatically block it from the site.
To make the links invisible to regular users, they have to be different from standard links. Honeypot traps will most commonly have “visibility: hidden” or “display: none” shown in their CSS properties. Another common property is a different link color, like “color:#fff” to hide it in the background.
IP restrictions
If your WiFi is connected but no internet access, your IP may be restricted. The easiest way for a website to spot a bot at work is by noticing a lot of requests and crawling coming from a single IP address. That is why many websites have certain IP restrictions regarding the number and frequency of requests per IP.
Rotating proxies and setting up delay timings for your bot can help prevent the site from detecting your bot.
Login requirements
Some websites, like Facebook and Instagram, require a user to login into their account first to access the information on the website. You need to reset Instagram password as well as Facebook if you lose it.
This is another common method, which unfortunately cannot be easily circumvented just by rotating proxies. Instead, it would be best if you programmed your web scraper to imitate the login steps a human would take. Alternatively, you can use a web scraping tool that offers such functionality.