Web scraping is the extraction of data from the website by using various types of software. Data is now the most important element in any business. By web scraping, the collection of data is made really easy and it can be harmful to the business. By using the web scraping element the data are collected in a particular format to a central database or a spreadsheet for later use. Due to the popularity of web scraping, many software designers are making new software to collect data more easily from the websites and giving the user better control to put features of the type of data they want. As a business owner, you should try to prevent this from happening. Web scraping makes the valuable data on your website be easily gained. There are many ways to protect your website from web scraping. In this article, some of the preventive measures to avoid web scraping are discussed.
Rate and limit individual ip addresses
To put a limitation of the use of IP address to browse your website and also to put a limit on the speed of browsing is one of the primary measures of preventing web scraping. Most often the software used by the person would send requests using a single IP address. If you are receiving multiple requests from a single Ip address chances are that they are trying to collect data through web scraping. Another way to detect a web scraper is that IP address would send requests too fast which makes it easy to block. However, nowadays an expert web scraper would know these measures that you are putting and can use multiple IP addresses at a much slower speed.
Include a login to your website
A normal HTTP website doesn't require a scrapper to share any kind of information to the website to browse it. The scrapper can easily scrape the data off your website without leaving any sort of trace. But if you implement a login requirement on your website then he would have to put some information on your website to access it. This won't prevent the scraper but would give you some traces to follow.
Make changes to your HTML constantly
A scrapper would depend on the HTML codes on your website to get the information that he needs. Changing and altering the HTML codes a bit can make it very hard for the scrapper to extract data out of your website. You wouldn't need to do massive changes in the codes of the HTML. Just some minor changes in the HTML codes would be enough to frustrate the scrapper. You can make changes in the class and id of the HTML codes on a regular basis to discourage hackers from trying to scrape your website.
Use media objects to give information to your user
Most scrapper reply on information to be available as text in your website for web scraping or also known as data scraping. You can prevent the scraping by adding a huge barrier for the scraper. You can use images instead of texts to give out information. You can use video to give more valuable information to your users. There are also some disadvantages to it as it will make the browsing slower for many users and can be a great hassle for you to update information on your website.
Use captcha when required
Captcha codes are used to differentiate humans from machines. It can be used to discourage the scraper from scraping as it can make the process slower. You have to be careful with how you put captcha on your website. You can put captcha to browse the more sensitive information on your website and also for users that are making multiple requests on your website. Too many captchas would frustrate the real users also so you should be careful with how you use it.