Web scraping is nowadays practiced by many users for individual or organizational reasons. It is commonly done to create a pool of information that could help them in their proceedings. But what is web scraping?
Web scraping is the art of scraping out data or other information from other websites. People often fall into the trap of getting caught which is set by the websites. To eradicate that, proxies are used to hide the presence and browse through websites that are restricted. Proxies change your identity and provide you access to a proxy IP address. Through this, you can scrape out data from other restricted websites.
What are the mistakes made while doing web scraping?
The first mistake would be not using a proxy itself, as no other tool could provide you this facility with this sort of anonymity that the proxies do.
- Having a free proxy – It’s great if you’re using a proxy for web scraping, but still, you shouldn’t opt for proxies directly online for free. The proxies publicly available for free are not secure and reliable as a majority of them won’t allow HTTPS connection. It also creates maximum downtime and performance lags, proving to be inefficient at multiple times while web scraping.
- Using just one proxy – If you’re using just one proxy for your web scraping needs, your number of making requests will simultaneously reduce. To eradicate this, you should have a pool of proxies where you can split your requests among a greater number of proxies.
- Loose management of proxy pool – Even if you have a proxy pool with multiple proxies, you should take proper care of its regular maintenance. You should ensure proper use of the proxies in troubleshooting and fixing issues.
- Getting into Honeypot traps – Honeypot traps are those traps where unauthorized access gets detected and the attempts are then prevented. To avoid this threat, you should make sure that the link which you’re following has proper visibility. Certain Honeypot links have the CSS style set to display none or their color simply bends to the color you are scraping on. However, detecting these threats is not as easy as it would require some programming work to be done. Though many websites do not use Honeypot threats.
- Repeating the same crawling patterns – You should change your BOT settings as if not done, your bot will be using the same crawling techniques which can be detected easily. To not get detected, you should make certain actions like a few mouse movements, random clicks, and actions on the page you are crawling.
