Tips for scraping business directories

Tips for scraping business directories

Are you looking to scrape business directories to generate leads?

Here are a few tips for scraping business directories.

Web scraping is not rocket science. But there are good and bad and worst ways of doing it.

Generating sales qualified leads is always a headache. The old school ways are to buy a list from sites like Data.com. But they are quite expensive.

Scraping business directories can help generate sales qualified leads. The following tips can help you scrape data from business directories efficiently.

1) Choose a good framework to write the web scrapers. This can help save a lot of time and trouble. Python Scrapy is our favourite, but there are other non-pythonic frameworks too.

2) The business directories might be having anti-scraping mechanisms. You have to use IP rotating services to do the scrape. Using IP rotating services, crawl with multiple changing IP addresses which can cover your tracks.

3) Some sites really don’t want you to scrape and they will block the bot. In these cases, you may need to disguise your web scraper as a human being. Browser automation tools like selenium can help you do this.

4) Web sites will update their data quite often. The scraper bot should be able to update the data according to the changes. This is a hard task and you need professional services to do that.

One of the easiest ways to generate leads is to scrape from business directories and use enrich them. We made Leadintel for lead research and enrichment.

Source: http://blog.datahut.co/tips-for-scraping-business-directories/

Content Scrapers – How to Find Out Who is Stealing Your Content & What to Do About It

If you have been blogging for a while, chances are you are familiar with content scrapers. Content scrapers are websites that steal your content for their own blogs without your permission. Some content scrapers will just copy the content off of your blog, but most use automated software that takes the content from your RSS feed and posts your content to their site like it is a new post.

In this post, we are going to look at some potential link building benefits to content scrapers, how to find out what sites are scraping your content, and what you can do if you want to either benefit from the linking standpoint or have them take it down.

Linking Benefits of Content Scrapers

Last week, I was happy to see that I was listed in ProBlogger’s 20 Bloggers to Watch in 2012. Within 24 hours, I received a notification in my WordPress dashboard that a page on my blog had been linked to in the post on ProBlogger’s site.

After receiving the original notification from the ProBlogger post, I also received another 18 trackbacks from sites that had stolen the content in their post verbatim. Trackbacks are WordPress’ way of letting you know that another website has linked to a post on your blog. In this case, these 18 sites had posted the content exactly like the original post – with the links back to my blog still intact.

It was then that I started contemplating the potential link building benefits of content scrapers. These are not by any means quality links – the highest Google PageRank was a PR 2 domain, many were stealing content in a variety of languages, and one even had the nerve to use some kind of redirection script to take away the link juice of outgoing links! So while these links didn’t have the same authority that the original post had, they still count as links.

How to Catch Content Scrapers

Unfortunately, unless you want to continuously search for your post titles in Google, you’ll only be able to easily track down sites that keep your in-content links active. If you want to know what websites are scraping your content, here are a few tips to sniff them out.

Copyscape

Copyscape is a simple search engine that allows you to enter the URL of your content to find out if there are duplicates of it on the Internet. You can get a few results using their free search, or you can pay for a premium account to check up to 10,000 pages on your site and more.

Trackbacks

The first way is through your trackbacks in WordPress (as shown in the image above). Many of these will show up in the spam folder if you use Akismet. The key to getting trackbacks to appear from content scrapers is to always include links to other posts in your content. Be sure those links have great anchor text too, if you’re going for a little extra link juice. And even if you are not, internal linking with strong anchor text is good for your on-site optimization too!

Anyone thinking about link building benefits at this point is probably noting the sheer volume of links from these sites, some of which are content scrapers. Essentially any site that is linking to a lot of your posts that isn’t a social network, social bookmarking site, or a die-hard fan who just loves linking to you is potentially a content scraper. You’ll have to go to their website to be sure. To find your links on their site, click on one of the domains to see the details of what pages on your site they are linking to specifically.

You can see here that they are just blatantly copying my posts titles. When I visited one of the links, sure enough, they are copying my entire posts in their full glory onto their site.

Google Alerts

If you don’t post often or want to keep up with any mentions of your top blog posts on other websites, you can create a Google Alert using the exact match for your post’s title by putting the title in quotation marks.

I deliver all of my Google Alerts to an RSS feed so I can manage them in Google Reader, but you can also have them delivered regularly by email. You’ll even get an instant preview of the types of results you will get.

How to Get Credit for Scraped Posts

If you use WordPress, then you definitely want to try out the RSS footer plugin. This plugin allows you to place a custom piece of text at the top or bottom of your RSS feed content.
As you can see, even if you aren’t using it for the purpose of getting credit back to your posts when content thieves steal it, you can still use it for a little extra bit of advertising with the possible benefit of people who subscribe to your RSS feed clicking through to your website or social profiles. And when someone does scrape your content from your RSS feed, it shows up there too

So in the event that someone finds your scraped content, they will hopefully notice the credit before assuming it was created by the blog that stole it. If you don’t have WordPress, you can simply include a note at the top or bottom of your content that includes the same information.

How to Stop Content Scrapers

If you’re not interested in anyone copying your content, then you have a few options to choose from. You can start by contacting the site that is stealing your content and sending them a notice that you want all of your content removed immediately. You can do this through the site’s contact form, email address, or post it to any social accounts they list.

If there is no contact information on the website stealing your content, you can do a Whois Lookup to (hopefully) find out who owns the domain.

If it is not privately registered, you should find an administrative contact’s email address. If not, you should at least see the domain registrar which, in this case, is GoDaddy and/or the hosting company for the website which, in this case, is HostGator. You can try to contact both companies (HostGator has a DMCA form and GoDaddy has an email) and let them know that the domain in question is stealing copyrighted content in hopes that the website will be suspended or removed.

You can also visit the DMCA and use their takedown services to remove anyone who is copying your photos, video, audio, blog, or other content. They even offer a WordPress plugin to incorporate a DMCA protected badge on your site to warn potential thieves.

Have you ever dealt with content scrapers and thieves? Do you leave it alone for the link benefits, or do you fight back? What other tools, services, or other preventative tactics do you use to block content scrapers? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

Source URL : https://blog.kissmetrics.com/content-scrapers/

Web Data Scraping: Practical Uses

Whether in the form of media, text or data in diverse other formats—the internet serves to be a huge storehouse of the world’s information. While browsing for commercial or business needs alike, users are exposed to numerous web pages that contain data in just about every form. Even though access to such data is extremely critical for garnering success in the contemporary world, unfortunately most of it is not open. More often than not, business websites restrict the accessibility options to such data and do not allow visitors to save or display them for reuse on their local storage devices, or onto their own websites.  This is where web data extraction tools come in handy.

Read on for a closer look into some of the common areas of data scraping usage.

• Gathering of data from diverse sources for analysis: In case a business necessitates the collection and analysis of data specific to certain categories from multiple websites, then it helps refer to web data integration experts or those related to the field of data scraping linked with categories like industrial equipment, real estate, automobiles, marketing, business contacts, electronic gadgets and so forth.

• Collection of data in different formats: Different websites are known to publish information and structured data in different formats. So, it may not be possible for organizations to see all the required data a one place, at any given time. Data scrapers allow the extraction of information spanning across multiple pages under various sections, on to a single database or spreadsheet.  This makes it easy for users to analyze (or visualize) the data.

• Helps Research: Data is an important and integral part of all kinds of research – marketing, academic or scientific. A data scraper helps in gathering structured data with ease.

• Market analysis for businesses: Companies that cater to products or services connected to specific domains require comprehensive data of products and services that are of similar kind, and which have a tendency of appearing in the market on a daily basis.

Web scraping software solutions from reputed companies are successful in keeping a constant watch on this kind of data and allow users to get access required information from diverse sources – all at the click of a button.
Go for data extraction to take your business to the next levels of success – you will not be disappointed.

Source URL : http://www.3idatascraping.com/web-data-scraping-practical-uses.php

Data Scraping - What Are Hand-Scraped Hardwood Floors and What Are the Benefits?

If you love the look of hardwood flooring with lots of character, then you may want to check out hand-scraped hardwood flooring. Hand-scraped wood provides a warm vintage look, providing the floor instant character. These types of scraped hardwoods are suitable for living rooms, dining rooms, hallways and bedrooms. But what exactly is hand-scraped hardwood flooring?

Well, it is literally what you think it is. Hand-scraped hardwood flooring is created by hand using specialized wood working tools to make each board unique and giving an overall "old worn" appearance.

At Innovation Builders we offer solid wood floors finished on site with an actual hand-scraping technique followed by stain and sealer. Solid wood floors are installed by an expert team of technicians who work each board with skilled craftsman-like attention to detail. Following the scraping procedure the floor is stained by hand with a customer selected stain color, and then protected with multiple coats of sealing and finishing polyurethane. This finishing process of staining, sealing and coating the wood floors contributes to providing the look and durability of an old reclaimed wood floor, but with today's tough, urethane finishes.

There are many, many benefits to hand-scraped wood flooring. Overall, these floors are extremely durable and hard wearing, providing years of trouble-free use. These wood floors remain looking newer for longer because the texture that the process provides hides the typical dents, dings and scratches that other floors can't hide so easily. That's great news for households with kids, dogs, and cats.

These types of wood flooring have another unique advantage as well. When you do scratch these floors during their lifetime, the scratches are easily repaired. As long as the scratch isn't too deep you can make them practically disappear without ever having to hire a professional. It's simple to hide the scratch by using a color-matched stain marker or repair kit that is readily available through local flooring distributors. These features make hand-scraped hardwood flooring a lot more durable and hassle-free to maintain than other types of wood flooring.

The expert processes utilized in the creation of these floors provides a custom look of worn wood with deep color and subtle highlights. When the light hits the wood at different times during the day, it provides an understated but powerful effect of depth and beauty. They instantly offer your rooms a rustic look full of character, allowing your home to become a warm and inviting environment. The rustic look of this wood provides a texture, style and rustic appeal that cannot be matched by any other type of flooring.

Hand-Scraped Hardwood Flooring is a floor that says welcome and adds a touch of elegance to any home. If you are looking to buy a new home and you haven't had the opportunity to see or feel hand scraped hardwoods, stop in any of the model homes at Innovation Builders in Keller, North Richland Hills or Grand Prairie, Texas and check it out!

Source URL :   http://yellowpagesdatascraping.blogspot.in/2015/06/data-scraping-what-are-hand-scraped.html