Four Ways IP Rotation Improves Web Scraping Performance

Are you a web scraper who extracts data from websites and content platforms? Then, you should use rotating proxies for the purpose. These proxies cloak your IP address by rotating it continuously to remain undetected by the target websites.

Nowadays, web scraping has become complicated due to bans imposed by wary websites, and a quality scraper and good proxies are needed. The proxies perform IP rotation and use multiple IPs to avoid bans.

Scraping is useful for purposes such as price comparison, SEO, market research, brand comparison, and others. Let’s look at how proxies help in effective web scraping.

A proxy provides you masked IP addresses so you can browse and scrape anonymously. The target websites will only view the IP of the proxy and not your real one. For scraping, you need to send numerous concurrent requests to the website, which will trigger its defenses, leading to a ban on your IP. Thus, without proxies, your scraping will not go far.

Types of Proxies for Data Scraping

Datacenter and residential proxies are typically used for web scraping. Datacenter proxies are bought from data centers and remarketed by the proxy provider. These proxies can be identified easily and blacklisted as they are from data centers.

The alternative is to use mobile or residential proxies for web scraping. Mobile proxies are IP addresses provided by mobile networks. Residential proxies are IP addresses from web connections in the homes of real people. As mobile and residential proxies are from connections of actual people, they enjoy greater anonymity.

IP rotation is essential for any proxy type you use. It involves rotating the IPs in use from one to another at set time intervals. IP rotation means your IP is changed after each request, so the target website will believe another person has given the new request. This tactic allows you to perform web scraping successfully as your IP is less likely to get blacklisted.

Below are Four Ways IP Rotation Improves Web Scraping Performance

Let’s now look at how IP rotation enhances web scraping efficiency:

1. Allows more parallel scrapes to go at the same time

To scrape a website, an e-commerce platform, for instance, you need first to have the number of sellers or products you want to get information about. With this data, you can determine the number of requests that need to be sent each second to the target website. You can then tweak your scraper and utilize good rotating proxies.

The solution to considerable web scraping is using multi-threaded data scrapers and IP rotation. This will enable your CPU to work parallelly and process data from multiple requests as they come in. In this way, you can significantly improve your data capture speed. This efficient method is needed to scrape data from Amazon and other large websites that host plenty of information.

2 Reduces the likelihood of getting blocked

To ensure your bot or scraper remains undetected, you can subscribe to a good quality VPN service that performs IP rotation using a range of proxy servers. Plus, you can induce pauses and time-gaps in your bot code to ensure your page triggers are not too regular.

You can also alter the bot headers to make the website think that a browser is sending the requests and not a coded program. Get rid of the query criteria from the URLs to take out identifiers that link the requests. Perform these tasks in addition to IP rotation escape detection.

3. Gives more control over your data collection

Large websites require you to navigate numerous pages to extract data, and you can use IP rotation in this case. Real users don’t utilize the same long process more than once, so changing IPs is essential here to make the website think that the requests are coming from multiple sources.

4. Builds IP rotation mechanism

A proxy server rotates your IPs and hides your actual IP address. It allows you to produce a collection of IPs and utilize them randomly to direct your data exchange or collection requests. It’s challenging to create an IP rotation mechanism in-house, but you need not worry as services like top VPN providers offer rotated IPs. These vendors typically use numerous cloud servers, with each having an exclusive IP address.

You can execute your extraction work in the cloud and use a range of IPs to send requests to the target site. By providing an inbuilt IP rotation facility through proxies, leading providers enable efficient web scraping and data extraction.

Final thoughts

IP rotation is an effective strategy to overcome the threat of blocking by target websites. Do your homework and pick a quality proxy provider that offers sound IP rotation services so you can extract your needed data anonymously and securely.