The Beneficial Relationship Between Proxies and Web Scraping

When researching a market, web scraping is an excellent way to gather public data from several websites. This process consolidates the data into an easily readable format, making market research as easy as clicking a button. You can use web scraping to gather any information, from what your competitors offer to the latest consumer needs. However, when scraping websites, you often find the websites blocking you or the process taking longer than usual. That’s why proxies are crucial to ensure you get accurate and fast scraping.

Best Proxy to Use

Proxy servers stand as the middleman between you and the website, ensuring the website doesn’t receive any of your information. There are many types of proxies available, from residential to datacenter. Residential proxies refer to a proxy server connected to a unique residential device. As these servers use IP addresses linked to actual devices in the targeted location, they’re the best to use if you want to look like an actual person browsing. Datacenter proxies are less secure than residential ones but are fine for protecting your identity during casual browsing.

You also get proxies specifically for social media, like Facebook and Instagram. However, none of these proxies are the best for scraping the web. They only have one IP address active when you use it. You can change your IP address, but generally, this is a manual process, which will slow down your scraping process.

Rotating Proxies

The best type of proxy for this process is a rotating proxy. A rotating proxy is unique in that, for every new request, a new IP address is assigned. This means you can launch hundreds of requests to thousands of websites, each receiving a different IP address. The rotating proxy also automatically rotates these IP addresses, each connected to a residential device, to ensure it looks like a natural person connecting. Further, the proxy pool is connected to backconnect nodes, which makes it easier to locate and connect to location-targeted IP pools.

The Benefits of Proxies

When you use a rotating proxy, there are many benefits that’ll make the scraping of websites easier and faster. Below, we considered some of the top advantages of using a rotating proxy.

Changing IP Address

When scraping the web, you’ll often find websites blocking you since the requests all come from one IP address. It’s flagged as suspicious or bot activity and shut down. However, with rotating proxies assigning a new residential IP address for each connection, you won’t have to worry about websites thinking it’s a bot. A unique IP address will be used to complete each website’s scraping, ensuring you have access to geo-locked content without being blocked.

Automated Proxy Rotator

Another great benefit is that changing the IP address is an automated feature. You don’t need to assign any IP addresses or manually switch to a new one. This saves you time, as your IP changing happens automatically during the process of scraping websites. It also means you don’t have to be a tech wiz to use a rotating proxy, as the server does everything for you.

Unlimited Parallel Connection

You can broaden your reach with up to 10,000 new connections, ensuring you gather market data from many different sources. You’re already boosting your speed with automated IP changing. Now, the proxy pool also lets you access unlimited parallel connections. These concurrent connections let you gather data from multiple websites within a short timeframe. It’s perfect for businesses looking into the current market trends and the competition’s offers.

Location-Targeted IP Pools

If you want to gather data from a targeted location or market, then rotating proxies allow you to connect to a single backconnect node for that specific market. The backconnect node will have thousands of unique residential IP addresses in its pool. This pool makes connecting with thousands of location-targeted IP addresses elementary and ensures you get relevant information. It also ensures results from another market don’t skew the information.

Accurate Data Collection

With the different benefits of these proxies, namely automated changing IPs, unlimited parallel connections, and location-targeted IPs, it’s no wonder you collect better data. To collect accurate data, you must have multiple sources specific to your target market. For that reason, rotating proxies are the best for collecting detailed information. For example, you can search for the latest consumer needs in America, collecting data from thousands of websites across the country at once. You don’t have to worry about an IP address set to the UK, or another country, skewing your data.

The Beneficial Relationship

Web scraping is vital to your marketing strategy, as it allows you to gain insight into market trends and industry needs. It can become arduous if you’re not using the correct tools. However, that’s why we’re here, to help you find the best way to streamline your information-gathering processes. Rotating proxies have many different benefits when you combine them with your web scraping tools.

This type of proxy offers new location-targeted IPs for every new connection, changing the IPs automatically and speeding up your process. When you’re making almost unlimited connections at once, you can be sure to gain the most accurate results with minimal effort on your side. You have all the benefits above and the added benefit of remaining secure while the proxy server does the scraping on your behalf. So consider the beneficial relationship between these two the next time you have to perform web scraping.