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Web scraping has rapidly become an indispensable asset, enhancing the ability to generate more leads, get insights into the competition, and monitoring marketing activity. Scraping web pages has become increasingly relevant in understanding customer communities. Even if websites have their content publicly available, active measures are being taken to prevent scraping by blocking suspicious, abusive IP addresses. This is because they do not believe in open data access. The question now is: How do you scrape websites without getting blocked by anti-scraping or bot detection tools.

Using a mobile proxy will do the trick. The mobile proxy lets you go only through a different IP address redirecting traffic through mobile hardware connected to 4G cellular towers. It is difficult, if not impossible to identify the hidden IP address. What the mobile proxy does is ensure a higher level of anonymity, privacy, and security. It will appear as if the request is coming from the mobile device. The target will not be able to see your machine's original IP address. Your choice of mobile proxy will be based on speed, reliability, and, of course, price.

As a rule, you should not use a public mobile proxy

If you have realized any kind of research into your proxy options, you are aware of the fact that proxies fall into the following categories: public, shared, and dedicated. Needless to say, it is not a good idea to deploy a public proxy if you are serious about web scraping. Besides the fact that a public proxy is of extremely low quality, it does not use HTTPS. The connection to the server is not encrypted, which translates into the fact that everyone is able to see the data you are sending via the network. Plus, it could contain malicious malware that can attack your devices in multiple ways. Visiting a website is enough to get a malware infection.

Now, you can choose between shared and dedicated mobile proxies. While a dedicated proxy offers exclusive rights to the user, a shared proxy implies multiple users at the same time. The decision between one or the other largely depends on the size of the project, what performance you are expecting, and, last but not least, your budget. Just so you know, the dedicated proxy is not accessible to anyone else and it works much faster. Thanks to the right provider, you can build a robust solution for your business. You will be required to make an upfront investment, but you will generate the best results.

Figure out how many mobile proxies you need

Knowing what mobile proxy provider to choose can be difficult. To be on the safe side, buy only from legitimate businesses. Having one IP address might not be enough. The website will immediately recognize a scraper if the requests are all coming from the same IP address. Having several IPs might come in handy. It is true that websites set limits, but nothing is too drastic as genuine human traffic will be affected. Ideally, you should have a pool of proxies because it enables you to rotate between IP addresses and avoid getting blocked by the website.

If it is not adequately managed, the pool of mobile proxies will not allow you to obtain high-quality data. This represents the unpleasant side of web scraping, but it is a highly necessary operation. In this sense, you will need to:

●       Identify bans - Ban identification makes it possible to troubleshoot and solve underlying problems such as captchas, blocks, redirects, and so on.

●       Retry HTTPS requests - In case you come across errors, bans, or timeouts, it is necessary to retry the failed proxy request through a completely different proxy.

●       Manage the proxy pool - Some of your web scraping projects will demand maintaining an authenticated session in the same browser. This is why it is necessary to configure the proxy pool to allow for this action.

●       Pay attention to geographical targeting - By using a premium proxy service, you can view and monitor geo-targeted content as if you were using your smartphone in any given location. configure your pool so that only certain proxies will be used for a given site.

How to integrate a mobile proxy/proxies into your web scraping software

Mobile proxies offer good value for good performance. Adding a list of mobile proxies to your existing software is pretty simple. The integration process implies passing the web scraper's request through the intermediary server and rotating proxy server IP addresses in-between requests. If you are not sure that you have done the work correctly, it is better to check with a specialist. Generally speaking, it is not complicated, meaning that it is a simple and quick procedure. Nonetheless, if you have trouble setting up the mobile proxies manually, do not worry because there must be someone out there to help you out with the server installation.

This is not the first time that you are fetching information from websites for business purposes, but that does not mean that you cannot use a piece of advice or two. You can leverage web scraping for gathering ideas and curating content, understand consumers' perceptions about certain companies and the products/ services they offer, monitor competitor prices, etc. Web scraping can be used in innumerable ways, in case you did not already know. Attention needs to be paid to the fact that some practices are considered illegal. Be careful how you deploy the data recently obtained. Make sure you do not violate any "Terms & Conditions" statements.

The bottom line

Web scraping has succeeded in changing the world for the better by automating the extraction of data in an efficient and effective way. It is no longer necessary to manually copy data and paste it. Using one or more mobile proxies is a great idea as you can mine a website with greater reliability and reduce the odds of getting banned or blocked. You can make your request from just about any geographical region or mobile hardware. Finally yet importantly, you are able to make a higher volume of requests when it comes down to a target website. Do not waste any more time and get started.  s

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