If you’re finding that your business is failing to capture the data your project is supposed to be scraping due to frequent blocks, the issue isn’t the scraper but rather the type of IP you’re connected from.
Residential IP addresses are highly trusted by most websites and therefore have become the requirement for enterprise-grade data capturing. The best proxy provider will offer this essential level of infrastructure to ensure their customers have as much uptime for their connections as possible.
Why your standard connection reveals too much
One reason why data centers are getting so quickly picked up is that these corporate-owned IP addresses are almost always cloud providers, and therefore get easily flagged as a non-human connection. Websites use a form of digital fingerprinting to identify every user that asks to make a connection, tracking device type, browser choice, and internet service provider (ISP) amongst other header information. This set of data helps them identify bot behaviour and stop it from accessing and slowing down their site for regular customers.
When your scraping traffic is pointed to the target website from a known data-center network like AWS or Azure, the website you want to access will automatically raise its defences due to you clearly broadcasting that you are an automated process and not a real human being. Sometimes it is easiest to understand this type of problem with a visual: a standard connection acts like a neon advertising sign. It very quickly and clearly communicates who you are, and in a very public manner.
Websites quickly block this type of visitor because they know exactly what you’re trying to access them for, and want to keep you out to free up space for their genuine potential customers. So for you to have success with a web scraping project, you’ll need to make sure you have a more discreet way of approaching the website for information.
How residential IPs make you look like a local
For the avoidance of doubt, a residential IP is a real address issued by a local ISP like Comcast or AT&T to a physical home. Because these IPs belong to a residential internet connection, the majority of websites inherently trust them, especially when compared to the particular type of digital fingerprint that connecting through a cloud-based data center carries.
If you consider that choosing to use a residential IP isn’t just having a specific preference for one particular type of technical setup, but rather a way to switch your internet identity, it can be much easier to understand how simple this is. Making your scraper look like a standard home user browsing the web becomes the ultimate key to unlock any anti-bot filters that your project may encounter during its application. When the scraper is using an IP tied to a real, physical location, it shares the same digital environment as the real customers you are trying to act as.
Bot-detection software always analyses the source of any connection to a website. Bad actors don’t usually use residential IP addresses, meaning that by making this decision to look like a standard home user, you are able to effectively borrow the trust that’s already been assigned by websites to a real homeowner.
Common business wins with residential IPs
The competitive edge that your business can gain by using a residential IP is knowing that the information your scraper is getting is always reliable. This is because the webpage your scraper will see is the exact same information that a real customer has in front of them, preventing any price discrimination or digital disinformation that some websites deploy to feed scrapers. Here are four ways that you will benefit by making a residential IP the base for your data gathering:
Unlocking accurate market research
When it comes to price discrimination, e-commerce websites can show different prices based on user behavior and location. If the website sees you connecting from a data center, rather than a residential IP, it may deliberately show you dummy prices or intentionally block access to business-critical data. Ensuring your data is scraped through a residential IP ensures that your market research campaign reflects the accurate, real-world, localized consumer pricing strategy.
Verifying your global ad campaigns
In running ad campaigns across the internet, you have to trust that the platform you’re paying is actually showing the correct advert in each specific region… or do you? You can verify that the correct ad is loading in each territory, and not being replaced by generic brand content, by using a proxy based in the specific location you’re advertising in.
Powering localized SEO monitoring
One of the hardest jobs to manage from a static IP address is tracking your search rankings and verifying that your SEO campaign is succeeding. Google always builds its results personalized to the location and reputation of the ISP that makes the search query. A data-center IP will almost always return a generic result; a residential IP returns the personalized result that customers in that local area see, which is vital to audit your SEO strategy.
Managing multiple social accounts safely
When using a third-party tool to manage multiple social media accounts, you can accidentally trigger a connection health fault with the social network itself. This can cause a “new device” or “new location” security flag which triggers mass account lockouts when you are managing multiple pages from one central office network. Using a residential IP can prevent this, and give you one regular local connection for the social platforms to recognise and trust.
What separates a great provider from a risky one?
Some low-cost proxy providers bulk buy poor-quality IPs and label them as residential. To protect your investment and scraping setup, look for a provider that manages its own pools or has a strict verification process within its IP pool. A second red flag to be aware of is whether a provider pays users to share their bandwidth, and whether it’s made clear to users that this is the explicit arrangement.
The likelihood is that if you are using a risky provider, you are going to be using IP addresses that have already been flagged. A reliable and best proxy provider is transparent about the sourcing of their IP pool, ensuring they deliver a high-trust pool that stays unblocked. To derisk your scraping campaign, you must vet the proxy provider before setting up your account. Transparency is the only indicator of a quality partner.
Where to start tomorrow
Residential IPs will always be the ultimate access pass for any business that needs to conduct serious data harvesting to inform its decision-making. Selecting a provider that can guarantee you a residential connection should be viewed as an infrastructural upgrade on data-center-based IP pools.
View this decision as choosing a high-assurance strategy instead of a high-risk one, as it’s far more likely to ensure that the IP addresses you use to collect data remain unblocked throughout your scraping campaign, regardless of the security complexities that the target website will deploy, which is why partnering with the best proxy provider is the most critical decision you will make.
