The points below should get you past most of the basic to intermediate anti-scraping mechanisms used by websites to block web scraping.

using a user agent string of a very old browser.

You can do this by specifying a ‘User-Agent’.

Too many requests from the same IP address in a very short time.

For example – go through all pages of search results, and go to each result only after grabbing links to them.

Following the same pattern while crawling.

Scraping too fast and too many pages, faster than a human ever can.

Here are a few easy giveaways that you are bot/scraper/crawler – What do these tools look for? Is this client a bot or a real user? And how do they find that? By looking for a few indicators that real users do and bots don’t.

Most anti-scraping tools block web scraping when you are scraping pages that are not allowed by Robots.txt. What if you need some data that is forbidden by Robots.txt. However, since most sites want to be on Google, arguably the largest scraper of websites globally, they allow access to bots and spiders. If it contains lines like the ones shown below, it means the site doesn’t like and does not want to be scraped. It is usually the root directory of a website –. You can find the robot.txt file on websites. This goes against the open nature of the Internet and may not seem fair, but the owners of the website are within their rights to resort to such behavior. Some websites allow Google to scrape their websites, by not allowing any other websites to scrape. It has specific rules for good behavior, such as how frequently you can scrape, which pages allow scraping, and which ones you can’t. Web spiders should ideally follow the robot.txt file for a website while scraping. Here are the web scraping best practices you can follow to avoid getting web scraping blocked: Respect Robots.txt How do you find out if a website has blocked or banned you ?.

Use a headless browser like Puppeteer, Selenium or Playwright.Rotate User Agents and corresponding HTTP Request Headers between requests.

Make requests through Proxies and rotate them as needed.Do not follow the same crawling pattern.Make the crawling slower, do not slam the server, treat websites nicely.Web Scraping best practices to follow to scrape without getting blocked In this article, we will talk about the best web scraping practices to follow to scrape websites without getting blocked by the anti-scraping or bot detection tools. Since web crawlers, scrapers or spiders (words used interchangeably) don’t really drive human website traffic and seemingly affect the performance of the site, some site administrators do not like spiders and try to block their access. If a crawler performs multiple requests per second and downloads large files, an under-powered server would have a hard time keeping up with requests from multiple crawlers. While most websites may not have anti-scraping mechanisms, some sites use measures that can lead to web scraping getting blocked, because they do not believe in open data access. Web Crawlers can retrieve data much quicker, in greater depth than humans, so bad scraping practices can have some impact on the performance of the site. Web scraping is a task that has to be performed responsibly so that it does not have a detrimental effect on the sites being scraped.

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