When your office gets blacklisted for spammy internet activity, it isn’t just a nuisance for your IT department to try and resolve on your behalf, but it will bring any revenue-generating activities you are running, such as competitive scraping or advert display verification, to a full stop immediately.
You know how important these types of activities are for your business, but it is equally important to understand how to remain invisible while making multiple access requests to target websites daily. The most common operational defence, allowing you to run these activities without being blacklisted, is to find the best proxy provider for your project. This way, you won’t have to react to a blacklist ban, but can proactively create an uninterrupted data flow into your decision-making processes.
Why websites block an IP address
It is a natural security mechanism that occurs when a website decides it must block an IP address from its activities. This can be for one of three reasons: rate limiting, behavioral fingerprinting, and geolocation mismatches.
If a website detects too many requests from a single IP address in a minuscule timeframe, it often hits a rate-limiting error. This is when the website says “enough is enough” and stops you from accessing it completely. These timeouts are a total lockout and can last minutes, hours, or days, depending on how severe the penalty is when applied by the server.
Websites can also analyze the data that is sent through when connecting, such as browser choice, location, and device type, combining these with navigation patterns and identifying that this user is identical to one that has already entered. This fingerprinting allows it to work out what is and isn’t non-human traffic.
A website can, over time, also begin to understand what its regular traffic patterns look like. If it expects 90% local traffic, i.e., from IP addresses local to the server it is hosted on, it can begin to assess that a vast number of connections originating from a foreign country or a data centre are spammy behaviours.
You are never blocked by a website out of spite, but rather because it must protect its own infrastructure to ensure it can serve its web pages to the actual users it wants or is expecting to visit. If your scraper acts like a machine, the website will treat it as one. Once you understand why bans occur, you can neutralize them by acting proactively. Websites will always be working on refining their defensive logic, so working through a proxy server in the first place will allow you to easily pivot your strategy and evolve it to match those changes.
How proxies help prevent IP bans
By running these projects through a proxy server connection, it gives your traffic a masked identity layer. Disguising yourself through a middleman server to present a different IP and location to your origin means that the target site sees this IP address instead of your office’s static IP.
This simple change means that your internal network can’t ever be flagged, and keeps your operations one step away from the security procedures that the website can impose on the IP address. You shouldn’t view the proxy solely as a tool, but rather as the first port of call to separate your business identity from your data-gathering practices.
IP rotation: the core strategy
Just to expand a little further, automatically switching your IP address at regular intervals, or after every single request has been completed, is the one step that allows you to stay ahead of any potential rate-limiting errors. If you never remain on a single IP address, the website cannot count your requests at all, and therefore is unable to effectively rate-limit your access.
Think of rotating your IP address as the tactical equivalent of an army moving locations up and down a trench every time they visit the frontlines of battle. It makes it utterly impossible for a target server to build a definitive profile of the ‘offence’ when they aren’t able to fully understand the build of your scraping project.
Geographic targeting: be local
When it comes to accessing a website from a locally relevant connection point, this is where the geo-targeting options of your proxy server come into play. Having the ability to select a connection point which is physically located in the same region as the target website means that you build trust signals with their web server before even making your requests.
If you are scraping a regional e-commerce website, you have to ensure that you look like you are browsing from that region, so it is registered as human activity. Using a global pool of IP addresses for your project allows you to blend into the environment, appearing as just another user from that specific location. When you combine this with a rotating IP address, it is the ultimate strategy for scraping geo-restricted data while appearing completely organic to the website’s security measures.
Choosing the right tool for the job
Each web scraping project requires its own unique combination of settings to guarantee its success. You must make a strategic choice as to whether it is more beneficial to use a static IP for the job or to set up with a rotating IP address. Static IPs are perfectly suited for any task that requires reliance on a persistent session, such as logging into an account. A rotating IP address is essential for any task that requires a high volume of data harvesting.
Making the wrong choice at this early stage is the most common cause of any avoidable IP ban. If you align your choice of IP type with the scraping project correctly in the first place, you minimize the costs of needing to purchase additional access points and the downtime in having to fix a broken workflow.
Our practical guide to setting up your proxy
Implementing a proxy server couldn’t be simpler. It is not as big and scary a process as many people assume it to be. Every single proxy provider uses one of two methods to verify who is allowed to use their network: either IP whitelisting or via username/password authentication. IP whitelisting is the fastest and most secure way for a provider to let you through automatically for dedicated server-to-server tasks, whilst username/password authentication is more flexible for team members working from different remote locations, asking them to enter credentials every time.
Most business scraping tools have a very simple proxy settings input box. You just insert the gateway address and port number provided by the provider. It is a plug-and-play architecture which doesn’t require your IT department to rebuild any of their software; they just have to route the existing traffic through the gateway.
Once set up, you mustn’t overlook the importance of doing an initial dry run test on a non-critical site. Check your IP address on whatsmyip.com before you touch the target website and prove to yourself that the proxy is routing correctly. This will ensure you don’t get banned on your main project before you’re even up and running. It saves hours of debugging time too by confirming the infrastructure is live before you activate the business-critical scraping tools to the real target.
Finally, you should always keep the provider’s dashboard open while the script runs for the first time. Look out for any error codes, such as a 403 Forbidden or a 429 Too Many Requests. If you see a spike in error codes, you have time to adjust your rotation settings before the entire pool of IP addresses you’re using is completely tarnished by a site-wide block.
The right architecture and proxy provider are crucial decisions
As you have learned, an IP ban is completely avoidable by using the right architecture and the best proxy provider for your needs. Preventing bans can give your business a clear competitive advantage; they will contend with fighting through bans and manual troubleshooting to continue their data scraping, while your business is shielded with the right proxy strategy.
At the end of the day, your focus should solely be on extracting and utilizing the data to make smart business decisions that can make or break your sales team’s next crucial call. Don’t let failing architecture or lack of IP access impact how your business wins its client contracts.