1st November 2020, Kathmandu
Scraping Google search results can become a hassle, and you’ve probably run into a severe problem when trying to try to do so.
You might be changing prox servers time and again while trying to web scrape from Google SERP. And you might not be able to bypass the Google automated System settings.
So, this article will guide you to web scrape using Google SERP API, which enables you to scrape without continuously changing proxy servers.
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping also called web harvesting, or web data extraction is information from a website. It’s the course of action of automating the extraction of site content material through a software program.
Web scraping an online page involves fetching it and extracting from it—high-level programs like Python and Java scape data employing a few code lines. Data is then parsed and stored to be processed later.
Why Scrape Google SERPS?
Obviously, Google has the best market share for a search engine, so it’s a no brainer to scrape Google SERPS.
Companies and individuals use that information for a spread of reasons, including:
SEO rank tracking
Ad verification
Content aggregation
Lead generation
After the data gets stored in an area database, it becomes easy to identify. When a business wants to work out their SEO initiatives are working well; they’ll see their page placement over time.
Google Search results also contain feature snippets, shopping results, local search maps, and many more. Web Scraping provides a transparent picture of how real-life users view SERPs from across the world.
Also Read: 10 Things You Should Never Search On Google
How Scraping SERPs Can Quickly facilitate your Uncover Damage Caused by a Hacker. It is very taxing and burdensome when a hacker makes it past your security and starts disrupting your hard work. SEO results might be all destroyed that took years to build up.
According to a survey of SEO professionals, it usually takes Google months to restore their original search results. They also rated more usually the damage from previous hacks to be severe.
You get valuable insights into your website and the website rankings and how they change during hacks while tracking your website’s SERPs. Tracking it also makes it easier for Google to reinstate your previous positions. Even just an 8hours downtime could result in a 35% drop in SERP rankings.
Small businesses are more vulnerable. Malware regularly leads to harm to your research results, and ultimately, you get blacklisted. And GoDaddy reported that 90% of the websites don’t even know about they carrying malware.
Doing routine scrape off all your SERPs and tracking the data historically can spot malware and hacks and even help you know about where the damage is most severe.
How to Web Scrape Google Search Results So, how can you really web scrape Google using Python?
Replace New York MTA York URL with www.google.com using this code. The response object holds the results, and then you can interrogate the data using the BeautifulSoup library.
But it isn’t as easy as it sounds; scraping can become a hassle because of parsing issues and connection limitations.
Parsing and Proxy Problems
Due to different structures in the other web pages, parsing information is also unique to each site. Parsing organic listings can often lead to strange results due to a lack of uniformity in Google search results.
Google tends to change its code over time, so the same thing might not work next month. Also, platforms like Google Search don’t appreciate high-volume web scraping.
So, they check the IP address of each user while they are searching. And those who act like a bot or computer are banned after about eight attempts or so every twenty hours.
Cybersecurity Issues
As Google doesn’t want automated computer programs or bots bypassing their services, cybersecurity is also one issue. To work around the problem, many coders even employ a proxy solution.
Google gets a different IP address with a proxy when resets the limit. But it’s just for once as after that; the proxy is blocked. And continuously changing proxy servers can become a nightmare while web scraping.
Google SERP API
But with the right API, Google SERP is easy to scrape.
With the right API, you get to web scrape without any restrictions as such programs work by rotating proxies. Such APIs also make sure that you only receive valid responses.
One such company that provides one of the best Google SERP API is Zenserp.
Benefits of Google SERP API
A good API isn’t just scraping to get search listings and ranking data
Google provides a broad range of services, including:
image search
shopping search
image reverse search
trends, etc.
A good API will help you scrape such data from a broad range of services to keep you one step ahead. It could also help you make strategies accordingly in your own business.
Advanced API Features
A good API not only helps you in web scraping with changing proxies. But it also has many features like:
Location-Based Results
Large Data Sets
Intelligent Parsers
