4 Methods From Semalt That'll Help Stop Website Scraping Bots

Website scraping is a power and comprehensive way to extract data. In the right hands, it will automate the collection and dissemination of information. However, in the wrong hands, it may lead to online thefts and stealing of intellectual properties as well as unfair competition. You can use the following methods to detect and stop website scraping that looks harmful to you.

1. Use an analysis tool:

An analysis tool will help you analyze whether a web scraping process is safe or not. With this tool, you can easily identify and block site scraping bots by examining structural web requests and its header information.

2. Employ a challenge-based approach:

It is a comprehensive approach that helps detect scraping bots. In this regard, you can use the proactive web components and evaluate visitor behavior, for example, his/her interaction with a website. You can also install JavaScript or activate cookies to get known whether a website is worth scraping or not. You can also use Captcha to block some unwanted visitors of your site.

3. Take a behavioral approach:

The behavioral approach will detect and identify bots that need to be migrated from one site to another. Using this method, you can check all the activities associated with a specific bot and determine if it is valuable and useful to your site or not. Most of the bots link themselves to the parent programs such as JavaScript, Chrome, Internet Explorer and HTML. If the behavior of those bots and their characteristics are not similar to the parent bot's behavior and characteristics, you should stop them.

4. Using robots.txt:

We use robots.txt to shield a site from scraping bots. However, this tool doesn't give the desired results in the long run. It works only when we activate it by signaling bad bots that they are not welcomed.

Conclusion

We should bear in mind that web scraping is not always malicious or harmful. There are some cases when the data owners want to share it with as many individuals as possible. For instance, various government sites provide data for the general public. Another example of legitimate scraping is aggregator sites or blogs such as travel websites, hotel booking portals, concert ticket sites, and news websites.