How To Perform Web Scraping: 5 Tips And Tricks
Website scraping seems to be simple, doesn’t it? You just find sites and take some data, that’s all. What can go wrong?
Actually, web scraping isn’t as easy as you might think. Here are several tips to help you achieve the best results while scraping websites. Want to scrape like a pro? Start right now!
5 tips on web scraping
- Respect the rules of the game.
This tip is obvious: scrape websites carefully. Check the robots.txt document to understand what pages you are allowed to scrape. Plus, it is a good idea to think about other people using the website. Intensive and frequent scraping can result in other visitors having a poor experience on the site.
- Be human.
This tip sounds weird, but we insist that you should imitate human behavior. We heartily recommend you to scrape slowly. Actually, the browsing speed is an excellent indicator for a site to check whether a visitor is a scraping tool or a real person.
- Take only what you really need.
Most marketers turn to be data hoarders as they collect everything they can. However, it is an irrational and ineffective approach. Instead of this, prepare a clear-cut plan for what you need and then follow it.
- Use a proxy.
If you don’t want to be blocked, you must use a proxy. With a proxy, you get hundreds of URLs, which means websites are unable to catch you while you are scraping for data.
- Getprofessional
Web scrapping can be incredibly difficult. Therefore, if you want to receive comprehensive results, find experts. Use finddatalab.com as this website scraping service can help you to transform hundreds of web pages into data your business needs. Moreover, you can choose from various easy-to-navigate formats, including Excel, CSV, JSON, and many others.
