The rotating proxy’s primary purpose is to hide the user’s identity to surf anonymously on the internet. Proxies are an excellent option for increasing web browsing speed. Furthermore, they also provide ease to create a security fence around the network.
Due to the increase in demand, different proxies are becoming available on the internet, specialized for various purposes. Rotating proxy is one of them.
Rotating proxies are very famous among developers because it is considered the best for scraping data from websites. It makes scraping easy by bypassing the blocking of IP addresses and hides the identity from website owners.
Let’s start from scratch and clear the basics of the topic. After that, we will dig further into much deeper details.
A rotating proxy is a proxy server from the proxy pool for every connection. This means the user can launch a script that sends 20,000 requests to any number of sites and can get 20,000 different IP addresses. Rotating an IP refers to changing (rotating) the IP addresses and generating an entirely new session according to the number of requests, status code, and time frame. Due to a new IP address assignment each time, rotating proxies can take your web scraping and site audits to the next level by protecting from subnet bans, which is the biggest drawback of data center proxies.
Rotating proxies have a lot of use cases, but they are mainly used while scraping data from the internet.
Mostly during web scraping, the website detects and blocks the IP addresses with multiple visits. Sometimes the server also puts the security check like CAPTCHA on the IP address. Therefore to avoid these kinds of problems, IP rotation can be of extreme importance.
Besides providing random IP addresses, rotating proxies enables the user to use IP addresses from various locations worldwide. It reduces web servers’ chances of keeping an eye on you unless the webserver has a more powerful anti-proxy system.
As we have seen earlier, rotating proxies primary purpose is to hide the identity while web scraping. Secondly, they prevent the chances of detection and blocking during web scraping.
However, there are also a lot of other benefits of using Rotating proxies. Let’s take a look at some practical use cases and analyze how rotating proxies can be of massive help.
Social media marketing is a very powerful tool because almost half the population has an account on social media. The competition on social media is getting very tough because every business needs to boost sales and grow.
For customer engagement, one needs to do consistent posting and replying to followers. Using multiple social media accounts can be very handy to handle this but using various social media accounts is against terms of use by most platforms.
Rotating proxies can resolve this issue by changing the IPs automatically, making the server think that the connection originates from a different location every time.
It’s not a very widespread term, but many websites impose geo-based IP rotations. Anyone from a specific area who tries to access it gets blocked. But there is a way to tackle this issue. Connecting to proxies outside the geo-restricted area gets you rid of the geo-block and gains you access to the website.
Rotating proxies will always help whether you want to watch a film or a TV show, access blogs, or get to something that is not allowed in your location. Further, it also helps you to be safe from getting banned since it will use a different IP for every new connection.
Web scraping and crawling are widely used trends to get into industries and markets and analyze the them. Web crawling is used for indexing information, while web scraping is used for extracting that particular information. Both the techniques are not allowed by most websites. But still, people are doing it. How?
Rotating proxies are the primary technique behind this famous concept used by many marketers and well-known scraping tools. The idea is straightforward, bots and scraper tools use different IPs to go through the web, thus reducing the chances of getting banned.
Just like social media marketing, SEO is an essential concept for every online business. Doing the right keyword research, ranking, technical optimizations, and competitor analysis are the factors that make SEO a handy technique.
Site audits are commonly performed on competitor’s websites to discover the keywords that make them rank first. A site audit is just a fancy name for web scraping and crawling. Doing a consistent site audit can block the IP address. A website has many pages. While going through all of them the software needs to send hundreds of requests to the server.
The intelligent way to achieve this is, of course, a rotating proxy. A new IP address for every request makes the site audits very easy and complete no matter how many pages need to be scraped or crawled.
In this article, we have seen what rotating proxies are, how they work, and also considered some practical use cases in which they can be of prime importance. They are used in different verticals bypassing geo-based IP locations, IP blocks, optimizing traffic balance, and streamlining the process of crawling and scraping. Due to the endless uses, rotating proxies are becoming more popular day by day.
