There Are Different Ways Of Protecting Your Company From Web Scraping
Companies want to know their competitors´ information
Web scraping has become one of the most used techniques nowadays especially by companies to collect website information. This is to know what is going on with their competitors such as prices, trends and new products. Once they get this information, they download it on their servers and later on use it whenever they need it. However, people have asked themselves if web scraping is legal or not. This will depend on the type of company and how it reacts when its web page is being scraped. There is protection against web scraping.
Protect yourself from web scraping
Scraping is not based only on taking information from different web pages but also on protecting against it. There are different ways to protect ourselves and our company from web scraping. We want to share some information that can help you protect your information and not allow anyone to take it away. Unfortunately, when this happens, it can affect your company and you can even lose money.
Ways to avoid web scraping
- One of the most effective and easy ways to avoid web scraping is taking legal action. Many companies legally report these attacks and prove that the guest is not allowed under the law. This is the main reason why you must have in your terms and conditions a clause saying that web scraping is not allowed. Such was the case of LinkedIn that sued some companies a few years ago by extracting data from a user through an automated request.
- You can avoid web scraping by preventing requests that come to you. No matter if you have banned scraping, there will always be someone who would like to continue doing it. You can identify the IP addresses and avoid requests that reach your servers by filtering them through a firewall. If you have a cloud, it gives you access to tools that block potential attacks. That’s the case of Amazon that helps you protect your server from possible attacks.
- Use request tokens. If you decide to use tokens in your app, this will force automated tools to make requests to the guests. This helps, as this whole process requires knowledge of programming to have access to professional tools.
- You must limit the number of requests for an IP address. If you prefer you can use a captcha when receiving a normal request on an IP address. This can block access to make sure that an attacker cannot use that service and either delete or copy your data.
- One of the best ways to control our information is to provide a webpage. This is the best way to monitor and restrict the use of our services to anyone who wants to scrape our information. Therefore if you don’t want to have any web scraping problems or complications with your website, you can rely on platforms that give you the peace of mind you’re looking for as well as all the services you need for each marketing campaign.
Contact us, we can help you protect your information from crawlers
As you can see, web scraping has become popular nowadays. Not only individuals are using it but different companies have found in web scraping a great tool to get the information they need. If you are a business owner, you will always be at risk of being a victim of web scraping. Therefore you must protect your information and the best way of doing this is with a professional team that can guide you and gives you the proper protection. If you are looking for a company that can protect you from all kinds of web scraping, do not hesitate and contact zenscrape.com. We are a professional team that we give you all the tools to protect your information and make sure that you will not suffer from web scraping at any time. No matter how big or small your business is, we customize each service according to your needs and budget.