This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
How to screen scrape a blog
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
Do you want to scrape data from the internet? Are you looking for a reliable web crawler? A web crawler, also known as bot or spider, systematically browses the internet for the purpose of web indexing.
The search engines use different spiders, bots and crawlers to update their web content and rank the sites on the basis of the information provided by the web crawlers. Similarly, the webmasters use different bots and spiders to make it easy for the search engines to rank their web pages.
These crawlers consume the resources and index millions of websites and blogs on a daily basis. You might have to face the issues of load and schedule when the web crawlers have a large collection of pages to access.
The numbers of web pages are extremely large, and even the best bots, spiders and web crawlers can fall short of making a complete index. However, DeepCrawl makes it easy for the webmasters and search engines to index different web pages.
An overview of DeepCrawl:
DeepCrawl validates different hyperlinks and HTML code. It is used to scrape data from the internet and to crawl different web pages at a time. Do you want to programmatically capture specific information from the World Wide Web for further processing? With DeepCrawl, you can perform multiple tasks at a time and can save lots of time and energy. This tool navigates the web pages, extracts the useful information, and helps you index your site in a proper way.
How to use DeepCrawl to index web pages?
Step#1: Understand the domain structure:
The first step is to install DeepCrawl. Before starting the crawl, it is also good to understand your website's domain structure. Go to www/non-www or http/https of the domain when you add a domain. You would also have to identify whether the website is using a sub-domain or not.
Step#2: Run the test crawl:
You can begin the process with the small web crawl and look for the possible issues on your website. You should also check whether the website can be crawled or not. For this, you would have to set the "Crawl Limit" to the low quantity. It will make the first check more efficient and accurate, and you don't have to wait for hours to get the results. All the URLs returning with errors codes such as 401 are denied automatically.
Step#3: Add the crawl restrictions:
In the next step, you can reduce the size of the crawl by excluding unnecessary pages. Adding restrictions will ensure that you are not wasting your time in crawling the URLs that are unimportant or useless. For this, you would have to click on the Remove Parameters button in the "Advanced Settings and add the unimportant URLs. DeepCrawl's "Robots Overwrite" feature allows us to identify the additional URLs that can be excluded with a custom robots.txt file, letting us test the impacts pushing new files to the live environment.
You can also use its "Page Grouping" feature to index your web pages at a fast speed.
Step#4: Test your results:
Once DeepCrawl has indexed all the web pages, the next step is to test the changes and ensure that your configuration is accurate. From here, you can increase the "Crawl Limit" before running the more in-depth crawl.
