If you are reading this post, I suppose that you started a web scraping project, and you find yourself getting blocked. Getting block came from the ignorance of factors that can help in the web scraping project. First, I will recommend you read my last post about web scraping.

Websites are blocked when they notice an activity which is not similar to human activity on their website. They generally stop web scraping bot which has a high-speed action.

I will list options to implement to avoid getting blocked in this post.

Switch User-Agent.

When I did my first web scraping project, I used User-Agent, as you can see in this post. The concept is straightforward, and using a User-Agent is the same as telling the website that you are using a particular browser on a specific computer. This method is used because websites that receive unusually traffic with high downloads, and they can suspect that it is a bot. They may check if the traffic comes from a real browser to confirm it. So, a User-Agent can be a good solution.

But, If you keep using the same User-Agent, the website may block you. The best solution here is to switch from time to time User-Agent. You can, for example, have a list of User-Agent stored in your computer program, and while running it, you can switch to be not detectable as a bot by the website.

Change the scraping speed.

One of the reasons you are blocked is because you or your program behave like a bot. It is essential to keep things as human as possible. When a human goes on a website and starts scraping information manually, he is slow.

This same rule has to be applied to designing a web scraping blog. It is crucial to set up a wait time to control the scraping speed.

Rotate IP addresses.

When a computer tries to contact a website, in our case for web scraping, we send an IP address to the webserver, which is like the computer's identity. If a website receives a considerable amount of requests coming from the same IP address, then I may conclude that it is a bot and block access to this IP address.

As web scraping is continuously sending requests to a website, a solution can be to rotate IP addresses. You can create a list of IPs you can use for each request to do this. Commercials provide services for automatic IP rotation. In addition, you can use methods like VPNs and proxies to change your IP address.

Conclusion

In this post, I presented various ways not to get blocked by websites while doing scraping. Those are the methods I used.

I know that order methods exist, and I will be glad if you share with me the one you use. Just drop the technique in the comment section or an article you read about it.