How to Avoid IP Blocking with Web Scraping – IP and Proxy Rotation

Dealing with scraping projects, whether for your business or for your clients, you have most probably faced situations, when your scrapers were blocked by targeted sites. So, you have probably wondered how to get around being blocked and prevent your web scraping project from failing.

Naturally, every site values its content and tries to stop web scraping bots as soon as notices them. Noting the IP address, the bot comes from, they add it to a block list, either for some time or forever. Knowing that the experience when websites block content scraping can be quite frustrating, we’ve made up our mind to share the easy ways to fix it.

The developers work on both sides: while some of them actively work to prevent websites from scraping, there are many similar specialists on the other side who create strategies to get around website block and build software solutions that are almost impossible to detect. Additionally, check some quick tips on how to prevent getting blacklisted while scraping with IP Rotation. Since the sites detect crawlers by their IP examining, a workable strategy to avoid being blocked is using a web scraper that operates in the cloud. It will not run off your local IP address.

Another method to get around the IP blocks from targeted websites is IP rotation. You should enable it for your cloud-based scraper as well. If you use some tool installed, you still need a special IP rotation service. It helps to send requests through different IP addresses it solves the majority of issues and allows to scrape websites without getting blocked. However, there are online resources that may use more advanced bot detection mechanisms and blacklists. Then the usage of residential or mobile proxies is advisable. It will make your requests look like numerous ‘real’ users access the site from varied locations. The chances to get blocked then are minimal, since a user often has one IP address. Having a million IP addresses you can surf the site like a million ordinary users and not arouse any suspicion. So you can scrape successfully for a longer time.

If you have logged into a site, it recognizes and knows you through the session cookies it sets. When the same session cookies come from different IPs, you get blocked. Similarly, can web scraping be detected if you send back that session cookie to a site? The resource knows already that the session is using a particular IP and a User-Agent. Rotating these 2 fields will bring more harm than good.

In case requests come from IPs that are continuous or lie within the same range, even the most primitive anti-scraping plugin can detect you are a bot and block content scraping.

Free proxies don’t live long, some expire even before a scraping session is completed. To prevent it from disrupting, create some code to automatically select and refresh the list of proxies list with working IP addresses. This will save you much time and help avoid frustration.

There are three major types of proxies available: transparent proxies, anonymous and elite. A transparent proxy is a server in between your computer and the World Wide Web. It redirects your requests as well as responses but does not modify them. With it, it’s simple to detect you are using a proxy. An anonymous proxy conceals your real IP address but submits the IP address of the proxy or leaves it blank. It helps to keep your privacy on the internet but still allows to see you are using a proxy server. If the developers really want to restrict access and stop scraping the website, they will set up to detect and block anonymous proxy. An elite proxy is ideal to pass any restrictions since it makes you seem like a regular internet user who is not using a proxy at all. Thus Elite Proxies are the best option.

With large-scale data projects, it’s reasonable to get premium proxies, even if you have to pay for them. Some providers can even rotate the IPs for you.

There are several techniques for avoiding IP blocking during web scraping. Those include IP rotation, setting real user agents, using different intervals between requests, using diverse referrers, and applying CAPTCHA-solving services. The key factor is scraping speed. Useful advice is to keep it slow, and you will not overload the website servers and will stay unnoticed.

Use online services and platforms for anonymous web scraping like ProxyCrawl. Services like ProxyCrawl offer IT and proxy packages and have developer API and crawlers for large-scale projects. Some free services with active proxy lists, like Chrome proxies, are also great for training. However, buying proxy lists from low-trust providers can not only lead your scraping project to failure but also lead to security breaches. The best idea is to use trusted companies and combine IP and user agent and proxy rotation not to get blocked.

Crawlers should change IP for every separate session. Please remember that changing IPs within a single session is useless because you will have more chances to be blocked/get inaccurate data due to the cookies.

Knowing some basics, you can cope with simple scraping projects without being detected. However, with serious projects and large-scale tasks, you will not like web scraping blocked in the process, so the best solution is to outsource such tasks to professionals, like DataOx. With 6+ years of experience in web data scraping, we know the best IP rotation services to use, strategies to apply, and measure to take to prevent website scraper from being blocked. Schedule a free consultation with DataOx expert and discuss the details.