How Rotating Proxies Can Improve Your Web Scraping Efforts

Web scraping is a very useful way for businesses to collect data that they can use for market research, pricing intelligence, improving SEO and many other uses. However, using your web scraper alongside a residential proxy is highly recommended if you really want to get the most benefits from your web scraping efforts. But, can a rotating proxy give even more advantages?

This article will look at IPs and how proxies can hide them for even better web scraping results. We’ll also look at the specific types of proxies that work best for web scraping, such as rotating residential proxies provided by Smartproxy. 

We’ll be covering the following topics on using rotating proxies for web scraping:

• What is an IP address?
• Why should you rotate your IP address?
• The benefits of using a rotating proxy for web scraping

What Is An IP Address?

An IP or Internet Protocol address is a unique string of numbers used to identify a network accessing the internet. Your IP also goes much further than just identifying your network. It’s also essential for allowing communication between your device and the internet. Without an IP, we wouldn’t be able to use the internet. 

Static IP Address

A static IP address remains the same and doesn’t ever change. The only way to change the IP is by getting a new ISP or requesting a change from your current ISP – which may come at a cost. Alternatively, you can use tools like VPNs or a residential proxy to camouflage your IP and make it appear different.

Dynamic IP Address

A dynamic IP address changes every so often. These changes are initiated and monitored by your ISP. As such, you don’t get the privacy or online anonymity you would when using tools like proxies or VPNs. You also can’t use the new IPs to bypass geo-restrictions as they’ll still be tied to your physical location.

Why Should You Rotate Your IP Address?

Everyone has an IP address, and this unique identifier carries a lot of your personal information with it. From your IP, people can discover your name and surname, where you live, what devices you use, and some can even track your browsing history and location. 

However, if you’re a web scraping business, you might want to hide or rotate your IP address for another reason. Websites will take notice if you launch multiple web scraping requests from the same IP. Your IP might be banned, leading to incomplete or inaccurate data. 

Other advantages of rotating your IP address include:

• Avoiding rate limits
• It can speed up your internet connection
• It assists with data scraping and mining to collect relevant information and metrics
• It can be used to evaluate research to ensure quality and quantity
• It can get you past geo-restrictions
• It can help you source the best deals and prices

Ways To Hide Your IP?

There are a few different ways available to help you disguise your IP address and keep it from being tracked or blocked. You can use a VPN that disguises your IP and encrypts your data. While this might solve the privacy issues, it won’t help your web scraping efforts. You can also manually change your IP, although this is very technical and time-consuming. 

The best way is to invest in a rotating proxy. These are a special type of residential proxies that automatically changes (or rotates) your IP with each new request. Being a residential proxy also means that these devices will look and appear to be real users as the assigned IP is linked to a real device.

The Benefits Of Using A Rotating Proxy For Web Scraping

If your business relies on web scraping, or if you want to scale your web scraping efforts, then a rotating proxy is a must. First off, a rotating proxy will change the IP address of each new request. This means that each scraping request you send will be associated with its own IP. This will keep your scraping tool from getting banned. 

Many websites limit the number of requests that can be made by the same IP address within a certain period of time. By rotating your IP, you’ll be able to collect a lot more data from the same sites, as there won’t be any throttles on the IP. 

This also means you’ll be able to run unlimited parallel connections. This will make it much faster to collect data. This will also make it possible to scale your web scraping efforts and simultaneously collect as much data for various projects. 

Final Thoughts

Web scraping can be a very useful tool for collecting data. However, many web scrapers are finding that they need to rotate their IP address to benefit their scraping efforts. More websites are banning IPs that seem to spam the site or that appear to be web scrapers. As such, web scrapers that want to scale their operations need to look into a rotating proxy to automatically change their IP with each new request.