5 Proven Ways to Bypass Anti-bot Techniques in 2023
A study by Imperva shows that 27.7% of all internet traffic in 2021 were malicious bots. On top of that, 69% of companies lost over 6% of revenue due to bot attacks in the same year.??
Considering these numbers, it’s no surprise that companies are employing advanced security measures and sophisticated anti-bot systems to protect themselves.
But what does this mean for the ethical web scraping community, or, in other words, good bots? With companies shielding up, public data gathering becomes more and more challenging, and overcoming complex anti-bot systems requires equally as advanced web scraping solutions.?
In this issue, I’ll present 5 proven ways to scrape responsibly and bypass anti-scraping techniques in 2023.?
To begin with ethical scraping, you should adhere to the robots.txt file. It has a set of rules you should respect as well as determines how frequently and which pages you can scrape.
Going further, if you’re using an automated scraping solution, it probably fetches data quickly and places requests in short intervals, which is unusual for a human. Anti-bot systems can easily spot such a scraper at work, making your efforts go down the drain.?
Mimicking human behavior is a proven way to avoid blocking. For starters, you can add programmatic sleep calls between requests, i.e., put delays to your web scraper’s code.?
Check out this tutorial on how to use the sleep() function from Python’s built-in time module to add time delays to your code:
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Another widely known way to bypass anti-scraping mechanisms is rotating your IP address. A rotating proxy assigns a new IP address for every new request. It means you can send 1000 requests to any number of websites by launching a script and getting 1000 different IP addresses.
Here’s an extensive tutorial on building a custom proxy rotator in Python. The author says it’ll work in any language you use for your scraping projects. I trust him on this one:
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An additional step you could take is rotate the user agent. It can protect you from getting blocked by using intermediate levels of bot detection. Check the article below on how to fake and rotate user agents using Python 3:
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The headless browser has revolutionized bypassing complex and sophisticated anti-bot systems. This tool not only helps to run automated tests but is also highly convenient for automating bots.
However, headless browsers, which impede scraping JS-reliant websites, can be detected with fingerprinting techniques. Check this tutorial, delving into how websites can use fingerprinting to detect headless browsers and what you can do to avoid being trapped:
Our learning hub, Scraping Experts, is on fire this month! ??
In the newest video lesson, Aleksandras ?ul?enko , Oxylabs' Scraper APIs Product Owner, presents solutions to the most common challenges of real estate monitoring which is essential for well-grounded insights about the market. He also demonstrates Oxylabs' freshly launched Real Estate Scraper API and discusses its benefits.
Also, on January 18, 2023, we’re hosting a webinar, Large-Scale Web Scraping: Never Get Blocked Again. During the event, Karolina ?arauskait? , Python Developer at Oxylabs, will share secrets to scraping public data from even the most complex targets. Hurry up to save your free spot:
Happy Holidays and see you next month!