Boost Your Web Scraping Efforts with a Residential Proxy

Intro

Businesses looking to enhance their web scraping capabilities should consider residential proxy servers. A web scraper is a valuable tool for companies but can become a significant challenge if not managed properly. By using proxies, you can overcome the challenges and risks associated with scraping websites.

What’s Web Scraping?

Web scraping is when you use a tool to collect information from websites. It literally “scrapes” the data, gathers it, and separates it into necessary information. Once all the data is together, it changes the information into a more readable format and presents it in a simple format such as a spreadsheet.

Why’s Web Scraping Essential?

You might wonder what the big deal is about collecting data, but you’ll be surprised at the answer. Around 73% of companies collect data from US residents and use that information in marketing.

Data is essential for any business’s growth. It helps you identify market niches, customer wants, client feedback, and competitor actions. It can also help them identify new leads and customers and give them a hint about which marketing tactics work most effectively.

Legality of Web Scraping

You might think web scrapers are intrusive and illegal. However, that’s not the case. When used ethically it can be a great tool for data collection. Web scraping should collect publicly available data, which anyone can collect with a simple search on the Internet. As such, it’s perfectly legal.

The benefits of web scrapers are that they gather data much faster than you’d be able to.

Where you might take days to weeks to collect the data, the scraper will do so in a few hours. It can also collect information more accurately. It targets specific keywords and sifts through a large amount of data within seconds.

What is a Residential Proxy?

A web scraper’s best friend is a proxy, especially a residential server. Proxies are servers that provide a unique IP address that conceals your own. The proxy’s server sends the request to the site instead of you, so you never directly interact with it.

This feature helps protect your identity and keeps online software and hackers from detecting you. Residential servers use IPs from actual home devices.

An ISP (Internet Service provider) assigns the IP address to a device, which means it looks like a user connection. It’s also an authentic IP address, unlike the instantly generated ones from a data center pool, so it’s less detectable.

Legality of Residential Servers

While it sounds slightly shady, using an IP that belongs to an actual device has become safer in recent years. Nowadays, trusted proxy providers ethically source these IP addresses. IP owners explicitly authorize providers to use their IP addresses.

Companies are also more transparent about where they source their IP addresses.

This ethical sourcing assures the legality of residential proxies and allows users to use them without worry. However, we recommend avoiding free proxies, as they’re not as secure and often not as transparently sourced as paid versions.

Six Reasons to Use Proxies When Web Scraping

Now, we finally get to the focus of this article, which is how a residential proxy can help you enhance your web scraping efforts. While there are multiple reasons to use proxies, we consider six of the most significant ones.

Reliability

Some websites will feed misleading or incorrect data. They do it to prevent their public information from being usable in data collection. It can lead to inaccurate conclusions and skewed results.

However, a residential server ensures the website can’t detect the web scraper, as it looks like a regular user. This way, you only collect accurate data, such as the competitor’s current deals and pricing.

Anonymity

The server’s residential IP hides your own, which means no one can use it to track you. If a website blocks your IP or generally bans competitor IPs, the residential IP address will allow you to bypass it.

Your entire connection is anonymous, which also helps you avoid detection. If hackers or others try to track your digital footprint, it’ll only lead to the proxy’s server and no further.

Automation

Some proxies contain automation tools that help you interact with the web scraper more easily. These tools also make it easier to use the proxy, which means you don’t need to be knowledgeable in coding or particularly tech-savvy.

It’ll also automatically gather only necessary data. The software filters the information using various keywords you assign. This way, you can start the process and receive the result without wasting much time on your side.

Geo-Targeting

Online search results are tailored to specific geo-locations. It means you can struggle to find data about a specific market if you’re not in that market. However, residential IPs are present in all parts of the world.

If you’re considering setting up a new branch somewhere else, you can save on travel costs by collecting data remotely. Your IP will register as a local, which lets you get authentic information.

Concurrent Sessions

Most proxies allow unlimited concurrent sessions. Depending on the proxy type, you can get a new IP address for every new connection (rotating proxies). This allows you to access and scrape multiple websites at once.

It increases the amount of data you can collect, which makes it easier to run large-scale operations. Since you’re running multiple concurrent sessions, you can even gather information on different topics.

No Bans

Some websites place blanket bans on an entire range of IPs. These IPs can relate to a specific geo-location or denominator, like AWD IPs. However, since the server uses an ISP-issued IP, it can avoid bans like these.

Your connection also looks more authentic, so the website is unlikely to detect your proxy usage. This allows you to avoid specific IP address bans while web scraping.

Boost Your Business’ Data Gathering

Web scraping can mean the difference between failing and successful operations. The importance of information cannot be overstated, as there are multiple ways for businesses to use data. A residential proxy will help enhance your web scraping by allowing you to collect more accurate data. It also enhances your anonymity, avoids bans, and accesses different geo-locations.