What Is Website Scraping? 5 Methods From Semalt To Prevent Illegal Website Scraping
Web scraping, also known as web harvesting, screen scraping or web data extraction, is a technology that helps organize and extract data from one or more websites. You can transform different URLs and use them in the form of CSS, JSON, REGEX, and XPATH files. So, web scraping is a complicated process of collecting information automatically from the net. The current web scraping programs and solutions range from ad-hoc to fully automated systems that can convert entire websites or blogs into useful and well-structured information.
Methods to prevent illegal website scraping:
A webmaster can use different measures to slow or stop the harmful bots. The most useful methods are described below:
1. Block the IP address:
You should block spammers IP address manually or with some reliable tools.
2. Disable the web service APIs:
It is good to disable the web service APIs that can be exposed by the systems. Bots that use agent strings can be blocked with this technique without a problem.
3. Monitor your web traffic:
It is important for all of us to monitor the web traffic as well as its quality. If you didn't use SEO services and are still receiving a large number of views, you might have been hit by bot traffic.
4. Use captcha:
You must use the captcha patterns to get rid of bad bots and website scrapers. Most often, bots cannot detect the text written in captcha and are unable to respond such challenges. This way, you can get human traffic only and get rid of bots.
5. Commercial anti-bot services:
A large number of companies offer antivirus and anti-bot programs. They also have a range of anti-scraping services for webmasters, bloggers, developers, and programmers. You can avail any of these services to get rid of illegal web scraping.
Two different ways to use website scrapers online:
With a web scraper, you can easily build sitemaps and navigate the site to extract meaningful data for yourself.
1. Scrape products and prices:
It has been proved that price optimization can help improve the gross profit margin by ten to twenty percent. Once the products and prices have been scraped, it will be easy for you to know how to grow your business online and how to sell a maximum number of products and services. This method is widely used by travel websites, e-commerce companies, and other similar online businesses.
2. Track your online presence easily:
It is an important and major aspect of web scraping where business profiles and the reviews of sites are scraped. It is used to check the performance of a specific product or service, reaction and behavior of the users, and the future of a business. This web scraping strategy could help to make lists and tables based on the users' reviews and business analytics.
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