How are websites limiting web Scraping?

In the previous article “Is Web Scraping Legal?”, We discussed the technicalities and legalities of web scraping and crawling. The websites use several techniques to block scrapers and crawlers.

Although the websites are less likely to find a legal course against the web crawlers, they undertake several techniques to limit the crawlers and scrapers. They are as follows,

1. Rate Throttling:

The websites limit the number of requests that they receive at any point in time. This is commonly used in the networking field as Race Limiter to limit the number of requests they receive in their network from other nodes/networks. This way, the number of bots that are trying to crawl and scrape can be restricted at any period of time to sustain the load on the website’s server. But this affects the scraping projects that are set up which requires scraping a website at regular intervals of time. This allows both the users of the website to have a good experience while scraping is done simultaneously on the backend.

2. Blocking:

Recently, Web scraping/crawling is happening in almost every website. But, many websites set simple regulations to limit the scraping or crawling while some other websites completely block these activities from happening on the website.

They implement this with various techniques like the following,

• Blocking:

The websites try to block the individual or the entire IP ranges of the bots which are trying to scrape their website.

• Captcha:

Many websites that don’t want their data to be scraped, set up captcha images in their pages so that it makes it much more difficult for the web scrapers to bypass. There are several ways to bypass this but smaller projects may not afford the time and effort to bypass and scrape the data.

• reCAPTCHA(v3):

Google recently came up with reCAPTCHA techniques to limit web scraping activities. Recently they rolled out the reCAPTCHA v3 to monitor and prevent the scrapers bots or other bots on the website. This monitors the malicious activities of the bots like posting reviews, posting comments, etc, and reports them in a dashboard to the webmasters/owners so that they can take necessary actions accordingly.

3. Modifying the content on the website:

The scrapers set up the bots for each website according to the layout of that particular website. Some websites, in order to make it difficult for the scrapers and in turn protect their data, change the layouts, and HTML markups of the websites. The bots are going to look for the data in the same place as the last time. If the layouts are changed, the scrapers have to set up the bot again according to the layout of the website which will increase the time, effort, and cost of the project.

The website owners and developers are working on different ways to limit the scraping/crawling of the data on their website. This makes it harder for companies to scrape data for their analytics or other projects. If the scrapers abide by the rules set by the owner/webmasters of the website, it’ll be a win-win situation for both the parties as the performance of the website is not interrupted and also the scraping can happen simultaneously.